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Why Tyson Refused to Allow Costco to Test For E. Coli

  • Spence Cooper
  • June 17, 2011

Several years ago, many may recall reading about Stephanie Smith, a young, 22 year-old children’s dance instructor who was stricken with a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli.

Smith was left paralyzed from the waist down, which Minnesota officials traced to the E. coli contaminated hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.

Since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead, the strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 has been banned from sales by meat companies and supermarkets.

Michael Moss and members of the New York Times staff won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 article “The Burger That Shattered Her Life”, detailing Stephanie Smith’s story in which Moss attempts to trace the origins of the contaminated hamburger that left Smith paralyzed.

As Michael Moss pointed out in 2009, tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen that in the U.S., mostly occurs in hamburger. Even then, in 2009, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.

In the Time’s award-winning story lies a potent reminder of the chilling and disturbing record of USDA neglect and massive food industry cover-up.

Tracing Hamburger Origins

Through interviews and government and corporate records obtained by Moss, the information Moss gleaned revealed that a single portion of hamburger meat is often a combination of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses.

The hamburger that Stephanie Smith ate was made by Cargill from a box of patties labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties”

According to Moss, confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records showed that the hamburger was made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin.

But the ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas, Uruguay, and a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

It turns out that using this hodgepodge combination of meat sources is practiced by most large hamburger producers, because it allows them to spend considerably less money than they would have spent for cuts of whole meat.

Tyson Refuses Sales to Costco Because of E. coli Test

The following 2009 claim by Moss is very telling: according to officials at two large grinding companies, many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli.

Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others.

The USDA conducts 15,000 spot checks a year for E. coli at meat plants and groceries nationwide, which the department admits is not nearly enough to be comprehensive.

As a result, the USDA relies on voluntarily testing at slaughterhouses and meat processing plants that is woefully inadequate and unreliable.

Moss claims Costco is one of the few meat producers that tests trimmings for E. coli before grinding, a practice it adopted after a New York woman was sickened in 1998 by its hamburger meat.

Craig Wilson, Costco’s then food safety director, told Moss the company decided it could not rely on its suppliers’ word alone for testing. Costco found E. coli in foreign and domestic beef trimmings and pressured suppliers to fix the problem.

But Costco met resistance from big slaughterhouses. “Tyson will not supply us,”Wilson said. “They don’t want us to test”

Moss claims another company that grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year had the same problem. Timothy P. Biela, the food safety officer at American Foodservice, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses.

“They would not sell to us,”said Biela. “If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that”

USDA — See no evil, hear no evil

In October 2007, Dr. Kirk Smith, who runs the Minnesota Health Department’s food-borne illness outbreak group, pinpointed the source of hamburger that paralyzed Stephanie Smith.

Dr. Smith issued a warning that was picked up by local news broadcasts. “We didn’t want people grilling these things over the weekend,”Dr. Smith said. “I’m positive we prevented illnesses. People sent us dozens of cartons with patties left. It was pretty contaminated stuff.”

Indeed, Moss claimed that eventually, health officials tied 11 cases of illness in Minnesota to the Cargill outbreak, in which it was estimated that 940 were sickened. Four of the 11 Minnesota victims developed hemolytic uremic syndrome.

But get this — even after Stephanie Smith was left paralyzed, and the source of her illness from E. coli had been traced to Cargill’s Angus Beef Patties, the USDA continued to allow meat processors and slaughterhouses to conduct voluntary only tests for E. coli.

Why Tyson Refused to Allow Costco to Test For E. ColiIn fact, Moss claims the USDA even knew that “Cargill had not followed its own safety program for controlling E. coli. For example, Cargill was supposed to obtain a certificate from each supplier showing that their tests had found no E. coli. But Cargill did not have a certificate for the Uruguayan trimmings used on the day it made the burgers that sickened Ms. Smith and others.”

In 2008, the following year, the USDA issued a draft guideline that urged, but did not order, processors to test ingredients before grinding. “Optimally, every production lot should be sampled and tested before leaving the supplier and again before use at the receiver,”the draft guideline said.

Only after Stephanie Smith was lying comatose in the hospital and almost 1,000 others sickened around the country, with several people contracting hemolytic uremic syndrome, did Cargill announce that it was recalling nearly one million pounds of beef patties.

And because of the mix of ingredients in the burgers, any attempt to trace the contamination to a specific slaughterhouse was pointless. The USDA efforts to find the ultimate source of the contamination went nowhere, wrote Moss.

Meanwhile, doctors say Stephanie Smith will never walk again.

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