Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [22]
With this introduction, we can now begin our discussion by examining the historical and modern reasons why government attempts to keep harmful bacteria out of food have proved so controversial and why they raise issues of politics as well as of science.
PART ONE
RESISTING FOOD SAFETY
FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES, KNOWING THAT I WAS WRITING about harmful bacteria in food, wondered why anyone would care about things so invisible, tasteless, unpronounceable, and, for the most part, innocuous. Like most people, they view occasional episodes of food “poisoning” as uncomfortable (sometimes very uncomfortable), but certainly more a matter of random bad luck than of decades of industry and government indifference, dithering, and outright obstructionism. They accept at face value the endlessly intoned mantra of industry and government: the United States has the safest food supply in the world.
Whether this assertion is true is a matter of some debate. Safety is relative. The most authoritative estimate of the yearly number of cases of foodborne disease in the United States defies belief: 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, 5,000 deaths. As the chapters in part 1 explain, such numbers undoubtedly underestimate the extent of the problem. Although the most frequent causes of these illnesses are viruses and species of bacteria—Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shigella, and Escherichia coli (E. coli)—most episodes are never reported to health authorities and their cause is unknown.1 From a science-based perspective, the risks and costs of foodborne illness are extremely high.
Furthermore, although outbreaks of foodborne illness have become more dangerous over the years, food producers resist the attempts of government agencies to institute control measures, and major food industries oppose pathogen control measures by every means at their disposal. They lobby Congress and federal agencies, challenge regulations in court, and encourage local obstruction of safety enforcement. We will see, for example, that the culture of opposition to food safety measures so permeates the beef industry that it led, in one shocking instance, to the assassination of federal and state meat inspectors.
To explain this culture of resistance, we need to understand that current problems of food safety are not new but are different. A century ago, the main sources of foodborne illness were milk from infected cows and spoiled meat from sick animals. Public health measures that we now take for granted—water chlorination and milk pasteurization, for example—eliminated typhoid fever, cholera, and most lethal diarrheal diseases. The food supply depended on local production and was largely decentralized. Fish, for example, were caught wild from the sea. Even though cattle were transported to common areas for slaughter and kept in close quarters—conditions ripe for spreading infections—federal inspection and veterinary care kept most sick animals from entering the food supply.
Today, centralized food production has created even more favorable conditions for dissemination of bacteria, protozoa, and viruses. We call these organisms by collective terms: microbes, microorganisms, or “bugs.” If harmful, they are pathogens. Many pathogens infect the animals we use for food without causing any visible signs of illness. Infected animals excrete pathogenic microbes in feces, however, and pass them along to other food animals,