David Theno and Tim Biela spent a day with me, explaining how currently available technology has helped Jack in the Box reduce the threat of foodborne illness. Steve Bjerklie shared his expertise on the meat industry’s response to food safety issues. For the Hudson Beef outbreak and federal meat recall policy, I relied heavily on the transcripts of two USDA meetings: the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection meeting held in Washington, D.C., September 10, 1997, and the FSIS Recall Policy Public Meeting held in Arlington, Virginia, September 24, 1997. Jan Sharp, one of the U.S. attorneys in the Hudson Foods case, and Steve Kay, the editor of Cattle Buyers Weekly, were also helpful. David Kroeger, the president of the Midwest Council of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, spoke to me about the effects of the Streamlined Inspection System during the late 1980s and of the reduced inspections under today’s new HACCP plans. The other USDA meat inspectors that I interviewed were equally informative but preferred not to be named. Felicia Nestor, at the Government Accountability Project, sent me a thick stack of USDA inspection reports given to her by federal whistleblowers. A straightforward account of the effort to create a science-based system of meat inspection can be found in Food Safety: Risk-Based Inspections and Microbial Monitoring Needed for Meat and Poultry (GAO Reports, June 1, 1994). The Center for Public Integrity has done a fine job investigating the meatpacking industry’s close ties to members of Congress. One of its reports, Safety Last: The Politics of E. coli and other Food-Borne Pathogens (Washington, D.C.: Center for Public Integrity, 1998) outlines how public health measures have in recent years been framed to suit the needs of well-funded private interests.
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193 called Sandra Gallegos: For the investigation of Harding’s illness, I relied on interviews with Lee Harding and Sandra Gallegos, as well as on Julie Collins, “Hudson Beef Recalclass="underline" How the Link Was Discovered,” Journal of Environmental Health, December 1, 1997; Tom Kenworthy, “Friendly Barbecue May Have Led to Meat Recall,” Washington Post, August 24, 1997; Tom Morgenthau, “Health Pros’ Detective Work Helps Arrest Villain E. coli,” Portland Oregonian, August 31, 1997; Ann Schrader, “Tracing E. coli to Meat Earns Awards for Workers,” Denver Post, September 18, 1997; and the transcript of the NAC Meat and Poultry Inspection Hearing, September 10, 1997.
194 Colorado was one of only six states: Meat and Poultry Inspection Hearing transcript, p. 396.
primarily to supply hamburgers for the Burger King chain: See Melanie Warner, “How Tyson Ate Hudson,” Fortune, October 27, 1997.
Roughly 35 million pounds of ground beef: See Steve Kay, “Hudson Recall Was Larger Than Reported,” Cattle Buyers Weekly, September 29, 1997. Kay’s estimate may in fact be too conservative, since it is based on a production rate of 400,000 pounds a day. The Hudson Beef plant could actually produce twice that amount daily.
195 roughly 200,000 people are sickened: Derived from the annual numbers cited in Mead et al., “Food-Related Illness and Death”: 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths.
more than a quarter of the American population: Ibid.
can precipitate long-term ailments: See James A. Lindsay, “Chronic Sequelae of Foodborne Disease,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 3, no. 4 (October/December 1997).
entirely new kinds of outbreaks are now occurring: See Tauxe, “Emerging Food-borne Diseases.”
196 a newly emerged pathogen: See Armstrong et al., “Emerging Foodborne Pathogens.”
thirteen large packinghouses now slaughter: Cited in James M. MacDonald and Michael Ollinger, “U.S. Meat Slaughter Consolidating Rapidly,” USDA Food Review, May 1, 1997.
more than a dozen other new foodborne pathogens: Cited in Tauxe, “Emerging Foodborne Diseases.”
infectious agents that have not yet been identified: See “Food-Related Illness and Death.”
defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals: See Consumer Product Safety Commission, press releases, June 1997–June 1999.
197 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples: The figures on ground beef contamination are from “Nationwide Federal Plant Raw Ground Beef Microbiological Survey, August 1993–March 1994,” United States Deartment of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service, Science and Technology, Microbiology Division, April 1996.
fatal in about one out of… cases: Mead et al., “Food-Related Illness and Death.”
“a food for the poor”: David Gerard Hogan, Selling ’Em by the Sack (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 22.
“The hamburger habit is just about as safe”: Quoted ibid., p. 32.
198 “nothing but White Castle Hamburgers and water”: By the end of the experiment the student was eating up to two dozen hamburgers a day. Quoted ibid., p. 33; Tennyson, Hamburger Heaven, p. 24.
pork had been the most popular: Interview with James Ratchford, American Meat Institute.
almost half of the employment in American agriculture… annual revenues generated by beef: National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Fact Sheet.
More than two-thirds of those hamburgers were bought: Cited in David Theno, “Raising the Bar to Ensure Safer Burgers,” San Diego Union-Tribune, August 27, 1997.
children between the ages of seven and thirteen ate: A survey by McDonald’s once found that children under the age of seven ate 1.7 hamburgers a week; those from seven to thirteen ate 6.2. People from thirteen to thirty ate 5.2; from thirty to thirty-five, 3.3; from thirty-five to sixty, 2.6; and over sixty, 1.3. Cited in Boas and Chain, Big Mac, p. 218.
more than seven hundred people in at least four states: See “Update: Multistate Outbreak of Escherichia coli 0157:H7 Infections from Hamburgers — Western United States, 1992–1993,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 16, 1993; and Fox, Spoiled, pp. 246–68.
199 In 1982 dozens of children were sickened: Nicols Fox offers the best account of this outbreak. See Fox, Spoiled, pp. 220–29.
“the possibility of a statistical association”: Quoted ibid., p. 227.
In the eight years since the Jack in the Box outbreak: I have taken the annual E. coli 0157:H7 numbers from Mead et al., “Food-Related Illness and Death” — 73,480 illnesses; 2,168 hospitalizations; 61 deaths — and multiplied them by 8.
In about 4 percent of reported E. coli 0157:H7 cases: Cited in Mead et al., “Food-related Illness and Death.”