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Meat from diseased animals approved for consumers

By LANCE GAY
Scripps Howard News Service
July 14, 2000

WASHINGTON - The federal agency overseeing food inspection is imposing new rules reclassifying as safe for human consumption animal carcasses with cancers, tumors and open sores.

Federal meat inspectors and consumer groups are protesting the move to classify tumors and open sores as aesthetic problems, which permits the meat to get the government's purple seal of approval as a wholesome food product.

"I don't want to eat pus from a chicken that has pneumonia. I think it's gross," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project. "Most Americans don't want to eat this sort of contamination in their meals."

Delmer Jones, a federal food inspector for 41 years who lives in Renlap, Ala., said he's so revolted by the lowering of food wholesomeness standards that he doesn't buy meat at the supermarket anymore because he doesn't trust that it is safe to eat.

"I eat very little to no meat, but sardines and fish," said Jones, president of the National Joint Council of Meat Inspection Locals, a union of 7,000 meat inspectors nationwide affiliated with the American Federation of Government Employees. He said he's trying to get his wife to stop eating meat. "I've told her what she's eating."

The union is battling related Agriculture Department plans to rely on scientific testing of samples of butchered meats to determine the wholesomeness of meat, rather than traditional item-by-item scrutiny by federal inspectors. A 1959 federal law requires inspectors from the Agriculture Department's Food Inspection and Safety System to inspect all slaughtered animals before they can be sold for human consumption.

The Agriculture Department began implementing the new policy as part of a pilot project in 24 slaughter houses last October, and plans to expand the system nationwide covering poultry, beef and pork. The agency this month extended until Aug. 29 the time for the public to comment on the regulations, and won't issue final rules until after the comments are received.

In 1998, the inspections and safety system reclassified an array of animal diseases as being "defects that rarely or never present a direct public health risk" and said "unaffected carcass portions" could be passed on to consumers by cutting out lesions.

Among animal diseases the agency said don't present a health danger are:

- Cancer;
- A pneumonia of poultry called airsacculitis;
- Glandular swellings or lymphomas;
- Sores;
- Infectious arthritis;
- Diseases caused by intestinal worms.

In the case of tumors, the guidelines state: "remove localized lesion(s) and pass unaffected carcass portions."

"They just cut off the areas,'' said Carol Blake, spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department's inspection and safety system.

But Jones and consumer groups say production lines are moving so fast that they can't catch all the diseased carcasses, and some are ending up on supermarket shelves.

"When I started inspecting, inspectors were looking at 13 birds a minute, then 40, and now it's 91 birds a minute with three inspectors. You cannot do your job with 91 birds a minute," Jones said.

The Agriculture Department is also experimenting with proposed rules that would require federal food inspectors to monitor what the plant employees are doing, rather than inspecting each carcass individually. They are aimed at bringing a new scientific approach to federal meat inspection to cut down on E. coli bacteria and other contamination.

The inspection and safety agency says a survey of pilot plants using the new system concluded that less than 1 percent of the poultry examined at the end of the production line and released for public consumption was unwholesome.

At a public hearing on the findings this year, Karen Henderson of Agriculture's division of field operations admitted that defective carcasses are being approved for human use under the pilot program.

"Absolutely. There's no system that we are aware of that is capable of temoving every defect from the process," she said.

Felicia Nestor, director of the Government Accountability Project, a Washington watchdog group, said the pilot project found chickens with higher levels of fecal and other contamination than in traditional methods of inspecting.

"A lot of diseased animals are going out," she said.

A. Raymond Randolph, a federal appeals court judge, this month said federal food safety laws require meat and poultry inspectors to examine every carcass that moves through slaughterhouses and processing plants.

"The laws clearly contemplate that when inspections are done, it will be federal inspectors, rather than private employees, who will make the critical determination whether a product is adulterated or unadulterated," he said. "Under the proposed plan, federal inspectors would be inspecting people, not carcasses."

On the Net: The federal inspectors web site is http://www.the-inspector.com

(Lance Gay writes for Scripps Howard News Service.
Contact him at gayl(at)shns.com)

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Meat with scab, pus and tumors is OK, USDA says

June 30, 2000 The Detroit Free Press by ELLIOT JASPIN

In a long tale of horrors, this chapter was among the worst. A workman slips and falls into a huge vat of meat being rendered into lard at a packing plant. His bones are fished out, but his body dissolves and is eventually packaged into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard" bound for America's kitchens. The scene from "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel about conditions in Chicago's meat-packing industry, shocked the nation.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an investigation to find whether such a thing had actually occurred (it had), and Congress called hearings to placate a public angry that it had practiced accidental cannibalism. The House Agriculture Committee, which convened on June 6, 1906, was soon embroiled in a debate on a bill to reform the meat industry. Everyone agreed that meat "unfit" for human consumption should be banned. But a dispute arose about how the bill should deal with something that might not hurt a person, but might be "offensive to his ideas as to what he will consume."

The bill said food should be "wholesome," a term meat industry executives tried but failed to have removed. Despite nearly a century of investigations, exposes, regulations and legislation, the debate that began that June day -- and culminated in the nation's first Meat Inspection Act, passed 94 years ago today --is still very much alive. While Congress was clear in 1906 that it was regulating both the safety and quality of meat, the USDA's new science-based inspection system may be tampering with that mandate.

Under the new inspection rules, which the government started enforcing in January 1998, traditional "poke and sniff" inspections were replaced by a series of tests intended to monitor critical points in meat processing. Now, under a set of new experimental rules, the same science-based inspection is being applied to inspections made at the time of slaughter.

While the new rules may protect consumers from food that will sicken or
even kill them, the regulations against what was termed "loathsome food" in 1906 have been weakened. Under the traditional poultry inspection system, federal inspectors viewed each carcass and culled diseased birds. To make absolutely certain only healthy birds were used, samples were taken after the first round of inspections. If a single lesion was found on a sample, it immediately triggered additional testing. If more defective birds were discovered, the government clamped successively stricter controls on the plant.

By contrast, the experimental regulations say a certain percentage of birds can have defects such as sores and scabs and still be shipped to consumers. That is because the regulations distinguish between health hazards -- such as fecal contamination, which can be lethal -- and flaws such as sores, scabs, pus and tumors which, while repugnant, do not make the meat unsafe, according to the government.

Depending on the type of defect, the government may or may not take action. The new regulations say, for example, that 52 percent of the birds sampled can have sores. A matter of semantics It is clear that the people who framed the original laws governing meat and poultry were concerned not only with the safety but also the quality of food. USDA officials issued a report in 1906 that said their inspectors condemned cattle which, while not diseased, had "repugnant conditions." "Flesh showing any unusual condition is always a source of apprehension to the American public who do not care to eat meat...should it present an offensive appearance," the report declared.

At the USDA hearings, food industry executives were less squeamish. Thomas
Wilson, a meat packing executive, tried unsuccessfully to weaken the language in the bill by replacing the words "unsound, unhealthful, or otherwise unfit for human food" with a simple admonition not to use carcasses "unfit for human food." The suggestion caused an uproar. One perplexed legislator told Wilson, "If it is unfit for human food, it should be condemned. If it is unsound and unhealthful, course it is unfit for human food. I do not see why you object to it." Judge Samuel Cowan, representing Texas cattle ranchers, tried a slightly different tack. "Now the term 'wholesome' I would take out entirely," Cowan told the committee. "I would not have that in the bill, because a thing that is wholesome to you might not be wholesome to me." When the bill was debated on the House floor 13 days later, legislators paid little heed to the meat packers' objections. Words such as "wholesome" stayed in because outside the industry, one legislator noted, "no one objects to them."

Nearly a century later, USDA officials still say they are responsible for making sure that food that reaches the consumer is wholesome. But as recently as last February, whistle-blowers inside the USDA said the government was allowing diseased chickens to be turned into chicken nuggets at a Gold Kist Inc. poultry plant in Guntersville, Ala. Following the inspectors' disclosures, several school systems refused to use the chicken nuggets, and a debate ensued on what was meant by "wholesome." The inspectors at the Gold Kist plants readily acknowledged that the chicken nuggets would not hurt anyone, arguing instead that they were not wholesome.

Federal officials would not respond to repeated requests to explain what
they meant by "wholesome," but their press releases emphasized that the Gold Kist products were safe. John Bekkers, Gold Kist president and chief operating officer, said in a statement, "As we have assured our customers all along, Gold Kist Farms brand chicken products are safe, wholesome and good to eat." Purpose defeated. The Gold Kist case shows that the definition of wholesomeness has become more flexible.

As part of its program to implement its science-based inspection methods, the USDA introduced its experimental inspection program last October at the Gold Kist plant. While the plant was supposedly chosen because it processed mostly young, healthy birds, farmers in the area said the flocks they were sending to the plant had been ravaged by disease for the past several years.

As one federal official later noted ruefully to investigators, "When the Guntersville plant receives birds free of disease," the experimental inspection program works well. But, he said, "When there is a high incidence of disease, complaints are raised." Because they are supposed to prod the company into policing itself, federal inspectors say, they were ordered not to take diseased chicken off the production line. That was the company's job, they were told. But the inspectors said that if the company didn't do its job, nothing much happened.

After the inspectors complained to Cox Newspapers in February about diseased poultry being sold to consumers, plant records owed a dramatic change. Just before news leaked out, the company condemned about 5 percent of its carcasses on any given day. Afterwards, the number skyrocketed to 33 percent.

Despite the testimony of its own inspectors as well as plant records, the USDA maintains that food leaving the Guntersville plant was and is "safe and wholesome." In press releases and public meetings, department officials went to great pains to point out that their new science-based inspection prevents anything harmful to humans from slipping through.

But as Nicols Fox, who has written extensively on the food industry, pointed out, "Unquestioned is whether science is even an appropriate standard for food. It is certainly not the way most people decide what to eat and what to avoid. Science might tell us that a cooked fly in our soup isn't dangerous or that sterilized manure is a safe protein ingredient in corn flakes, but neither would be acceptable to most of us."