Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [62]
She’s wrong.
The outbreak was not limited to the Northeast, as she suggested. Meat loaded into a refrigerated cooler one morning in New Jersey can be unloaded in Texas two days later—which is where some of Wampler’s chicken and turkey ended up. School cafeterias in Wharton, Texas—just down the Brazos River from A & M, where Murano taught—received some of the Wampler products that were later recalled, as did Houston area schools. If you didn’t see the headline POTENTIALLY LETHAL TURKEY DELIVERED TO LOCAL SCHOOLS, that’s because the USDA decided to keep it quiet. Agency bureaucrats know Wampler’s products are distributed through the national school lunch program, but the public didn’t know until former USDA veterinarian Lester Friedlander found out that tainted meat had been served in the school his grandchildren attend. Friedlander tipped off food-safety activists in Washington, who confronted the USDA.
Murano was also wrong about testing failing to stop the product from being distributed. Wampler had tested and found Listeria in its New Jersey plant and said it made the tests available to the USDA inspectors. “Made available” was later defined as having left the test reports in an unlocked drawer. The inspectors working for Murano didn’t conduct any testing. Under a new system put in place while Clinton was in office, the company writes a sanitation plan that identifies critical control points where inspectors watch over the process. Testing for Listeria was not in Wampler’s plan, Erthal said. Wampler takes samples and tests them in their quality-assurance lab, but that information was never made available to the USDA inspectors. Testing by the USDA didn’t fail; it wasn’t done. And testing by the company didn’t fail. The company’s tests found Listeria; the results just weren’t reported.
Murano’s solution to this perfect catch-22 was a risk-assessment study of the Listeria problem—something both the USDA and the FDA had already done before writing the Clinton rules. Until the study was done and a permanent solution proposed, Murano urged companies to share their test results, since they have more information about contamination in their plants than the USDA could ever gather. “People are dying,” said Donna Rosenbaum, a microbial biologist who helped found STOP. “There is a deadly pathogen out there. People are getting sick right now. We were pressing them hard to put the Clinton rules on the books. No, they were going to do a risk assessment.” The regs Bush killed would have required much more extensive testing any time the company testing turned up harmful bacteria.
Until the risks are thoroughly assessed by yet another study, the lunch meat you buy may be a biohazard. You might want to cook that ready-to-eat smoked turkey before you make that sandwich for your kids. And do thoroughly scrub the counter or anything else that has come into contact with the meat.
THOSE OF US who eat meat are getting some help from a “blue state” Democrat in Congress. California congressman Henry Waxman, who seems to be pretty much right on every issue he takes up, wrote to Murano’s boss, ag secretary Ann Veneman, asking the same questions Frank Niemtzow’s surviving family members are asking. Why wasn’t this tragedy prevented? “First, we understand that USDA knew about sanitation violations at the Wampler Foods plant in Franconia before it initiated the investigation that ultimately led to the recall,” wrote Waxman.