 Christopher Meunier, 7, had not been sick since he was a toddler, but in late November, he suddenly had a high fever and bloody diarrhea and started vomiting.Skip to next paragraphMultimedia
“He was just in screaming
pain,” said his mother, Gabrielle Meunier of South Burlington, Vt. “He
said, ‘It hurts so bad, I want to die’ — something you don’t expect to
hear out of a 7yearold’s mouth.”
Hospitalized for six days, Christopher had salmonella
poisoning, making him one of more than 500 people sickened across the
country after eating peanut butter or peanut products made at a Peanut
Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Ga.
The Food and Drug Administration
has charged that the company knowingly shipped contaminated products to
some of the largest food makers in the country from a plant that was
never designed to make peanut butter safely, causing one of the most
extensive food recalls in history. The company responded that it
disagreed with some of the agency’s findings and that it had “taken
extraordinary measures to identify and recall all products that have
been identified as presenting a potential risk.”
Food scares have
become as common as Midwestern tornadoes. Cantaloupes, jalapeños,
lettuce, spinach and tomatoes have all been subject to major recalls in
recent years. And a growing list of manufacturers and trade
associations joined consumer advocates in begging for stricter
regulations — calls that the Bush administration largely rejected.
A clutch of legislative proposals this year would offer fixes to the system, and people offering those measures expect President Obama to support them because, as a candidate, he repeatedly promised reforms.
“Far
too often, tainted food is not recalled until too late,” Mr. Obama said
last year. “When I am president, it will not be business as usual when
it comes to food safety. I will provide additional resources to hire more federal food inspectors.”
Nearly
all of the proposed legislation under consideration would require
companies like the Peanut Corporation of America to lay out specific
plans for manufacturing safely and testing routinely. The bills would
require that test results and other records be made available to
government inspectors upon demand, and would provide additional money
for more intense inspections of domestic and foreign food factories.
Some would also fix the patchwork system by which outbreaks are
detected.
Senator Richard J. Durbin,
Democrat of Illinois, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of
Connecticut, also propose creating a food agency independent of the
F.D.A. so that food would receive singleminded attention. At present,
at least 12 federal agencies regulate food safety. The battle between
those who would strengthen the F.D.A. and those who would break it up
will be an important fight this year.
“I think I can prevail on
the president to take a fresh look at this,” Mr. Durbin said. “We can
no longer forgive or explain what’s happening with food safety in this
country.”
Neither the White House nor the Health and Human Services Department
would comment on Thursday. But the peanut case, critics say,
demonstrates just how badly the system needs fixing, starting with the
patchwork surveillance system that is the first indicator that
something has gone wrong.
Cases like Christopher’s are reported to local health departments, which in turn are to report them to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By midNovember, the disease centers had seen enough cases of a similar strain of salmonella to be concerned.
“The
numbers were not necessarily significant initially — one here, one
there,” said Lola Russell, a disease centers spokeswoman. “Over time,
those numbers began to grow.”
By midDecember, the Minnesota
Department of Health, known as among the best in the nation, had
received reports of nine people with salmonella poisoning. As a result,
the department’s Team Diarrhea, a group of graduate students who work
nights, started calling patients and their caregivers to ask about
their food choices .
“We had a lot of peanutbutter eaters,”
said Carlota Medus, a state epidemiologist. “But none of the brand
names were matching up well.”
Other states were reporting similar
cases, but as in Minnesota, no one could figure out the shared food.
The process is fraught with uncertainty. State health officials ask
people what they remember eating in the days before they became ill.
Poor memories and bad records hamper these efforts, and officials are
often sent on fruitless pursuits.Delay is part of the problem.
More than two weeks generally pass between the time someone is
diagnosed with an illness and the result of a stool sample test is
passed on to federal officials.Last year, the F.D.A. announced a recall of tomatoes, only to
discover near the end of the outbreak that the problem had actually
been with jalapeños. Tomato growers, who saw much of their crop
destroyed and endured millions in losses, were outraged.
With the illnesses involving peanut butter, an initial suspect was chicken. “The
chicken was actually a red herring,” said Ms. Russell of the C.D.C., a
diversion that resulted from an outbreak of illness among people who
had eaten chicken at an Ohio restaurant as well as peanut butter at a
school cafeteria. Then on Dec. 22, a nursing home in northern Minnesota reported a cluster of cases. Investigating outbreaks in nursing homes
is both more challenging and easier than elsewhere — easier because the
facilities have set menus, harder because patients are often unable to
say what menu choices they ate. Then another nursing home
reported illnesses. On Dec. 28, a Minnesota elementary school reported
two children who had become ill. The holidays prevented state workers
from talking to school cafeteria workers, but the health department was
able to track down the school’s food supplier. Everyone seemed to be
eating peanut butter. Finally, a state health worker asked the
nursing homes if they still had jars of the suspect peanut butter. One
did, and on Jan. 9, that peanut butter tested positive for salmonella.
The state announced that King Nut peanut butter, sold only to
institutions, was the culprit. King Nut’s product was made by the
Peanut Corporation of America. The F.D.A. then descended on the
Georgia plant with a team of inspectors. It used authority granted
under a 2002 bioterrorism law to demand records that inspectors from
the Georgia Agriculture Department, which had inspected it twice before
without finding serious violations, had not been given access to. The
records showed that on 12 occasions from 2007 to 2008, tests of peanut
products made at the plant were contaminated by salmonella. Each time,
retests came up clean. But F.D.A. officials said the initial tests
should have led plant officials to quarantine their product and clean
their facility — neither of which occurred.
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