In the years leading up to the deadly listeria outbreak, we can now trace its origins back. Reminded me of Boar’s Head Deli Meat, U.S. Department of Agriculture records show Biden administration officials have quietly slashed planned bacterial testing across the U.S. food supply.
The ministry said the reductions did not result in a significant reduction in the number of tests at laboratories. The boar’s head is now closed A factory in Jarratt, Virginia, has been blamed for the outbreak.
Other Boar’s Head plants are also currently under investigation by law enforcement. CBS News reported On Thursday, federal food safety officials promised a “thorough investigation” into what went wrong leading up to the outbreak, which has resulted in at least 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.
The Biden administration has not provided an explanation for the decision to change. And now there are questions about why. Boar’s Head factory’s longstanding violations There was no prompting for regulators to reverse course, increase testing or increase federal oversight.
“The threat of government agencies coming in, taking samples, and shutting everything down if they test positive keeps government agencies honest and upholds standards,” said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America. We are setting it up.”
The Consumers Federation of America leads a coalition of nonprofit food safety advocates that has been meeting monthly with Biden administration officials on these issues, including in recent weeks after the Boar’s Head outbreak. .
The Federal Food Safety and Inspection Agency receives limited resources from Congress compared to the scale of inspections conducted by the private sector. The agency also faces “ongoing challenges” in recruiting and retaining food safety inspectors due to competition for talent from the private sector.
Federal oversight is one important way to encourage producers and the retailers they serve to be more aggressive in testing between inspections, Gremillion said.
“We want to test in such a way that when a government agency comes in and tests, we get the same result, which is negative,” he said.
Reduce random sampling by 50%
After years of conducting more than 200,000 tests a year, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service will reduce the number of clinical tests by at least 54,000 next year, according to a 2023 planning document. Changes were made.
These reductions spanned a wide range of products overseen by the Inspection Service, which is tasked with ensuring food safety at slaughterhouses, processing facilities and importers across the country. The list of changes includes reducing testing of poultry for Campylobacter and ending testing of pork products for Campylobacter. “Forever chemicals.”
For prepared foods, including deli meats, inspectors conduct 7,392 fewer inspections. Much of this reduction was due to the decision to reduce random sampling by 50% for the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella enterica, which are common causes of infectious disease. food poisoning occurrence.
At the time, the agency said it would maintain product sampling levels at “high-risk facilities” during the fiscal year.
In an email, a spokesperson acknowledged that the agency had reduced random product sampling last year, but that “routine risk-based sampling remained the same. This was carried out at Jarratt’s Boar’s Head facility. It had nothing to do with the test.”
The Boar’s Head plant in Jarratt, Virginia, is inspected about once a month and has found little change, FSIS records show. Rather, it appears that most modern tests are simply coded as risk-based tests rather than random tests.
“Someone who really gives me a headache”
Deli meats like liverwurst have long been known to carry a high risk of foodborne illness. Boar’s Head announced earlier this month that it had decided to stop selling liverwurst after an investigation found the root cause of the outbreak was a “specific manufacturing process” used in Jarratt’s liverwurst. .
“There’s a reason this is a high-risk food. There’s a raw side and a ready-to-eat side. And, you know, there’s a higher risk of cross-contamination than in a granola bar factory. But in a way. So, that means if liverwurst is the cause of all Listeria cases, it needs to be looked at further,” Gremillion said.
He said federal inspectors had the option of conducting further “enhanced” inspections at the plant, but an analysis of federal records shared with Gremillion by CBS News shows no inspections were conducted at Jarratt’s Boar’s Head facility. This suggests that it was not implemented.
“Who would do additional sampling if it wasn’t for this plant that has black mold and pig’s blood in it? It’s a real head-scratcher,” he said.
CBS News first reported in August that inspectors general had issued the warning. Dozens of violations Things at the factory leading up to the outbreak. These “noncompliance” records, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that inspectors have written up the factory multiple times over concerns about problems such as live insects and mold found inside the facility. was shown.
Early records later released by the agency suggest that inspectors at the site had concerns about the plant going back to at least 2022, when they conducted a food safety assessment of the facility.
Rather than deciding to suspend inspections of the facility and making it illegal for the factory to continue operating, inspectors can request increased testing of this type due to “increased public health risk.” .
“They have a big penalty for pulling inspectors. Otherwise, they just wag their fingers. And when it comes to food safety assessments, I mean, we’ve never waved our fingers. We’ve been moving it and now we’re going to do it.’ A bunch of people come down and wag their fingers even harder at you,” Gremillion said.
Rethinking regulatory structures
Outside of the evaluation, day-to-day oversight of the Boar’s Head plant (mainly conducted by state inspectors in Virginia through a decades-old outsourcing agreement developed for local facilities) also appears to be proceeding as usual.
A spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services said that in the year leading up to the plant’s closure, its inspectors completed 2,127 “assignments” assigned to it by the USDA public health system. He said he did.
A spokesperson for the Food Safety and Inspection Service acknowledged that inspectors have “performed a relatively constant number of assigned routine inspection tasks” at the plant each year for the past 10 years.
A spokesperson for Boar’s Head did not respond to a request for comment. In previous statements, the company defended its response to violations flagged by inspectors at the Jarratt factory, saying it always promptly addressed concerns after they were flagged.
Gremillion said “one of the most alarming aspects of this outbreak” was the fact that Virginia inspectors were entering the plant daily for the Department of Agriculture and documenting the growing problems. Ta.
“It makes me wonder if we need to rethink the entire regulatory structure. There’s resistance to shutting down factories, and there’s not enough FSIS can do about it,” he said.