Puerto Montt, Chile – In the Pacific Northwest, where I’ve lived and worked for 40 years, salmon is more than a commodity. It’s a regional icon and an article of faith, part of a regional doctrine that dictates: thou shalt eat wild salmon only, for farmed salmon is a blasphemy.

As a journalist with agnostic tendencies, I’ve never really subscribed to this belief. But I’ve always been a tad suspicious of farmed salmon. I suppose it has to do with vague recollections of something I read about the use of antibiotics, or to the label we frequently see on salmon packages: “color added.”

So when I jetted off to Chile a few weeks ago, it was with a twinge of skepticism.

Over the following five days, I saw a lot of fish. I walked the galvanized steel catwalks around floating netpens the size of three football fields and 100 feet deep – pens that contained millions of Atlantic salmon, shadowy missiles milling beneath the surface until the automatic feeders spring to action and the surface suddenly boils with bright, silvery, hungry salmon that reminded me of an Alaska spawning run.

I toured factories that resemble surgical wards, with scores of workers draped in white gowns, masks and rubber boots, stepping through disinfectant baths between rooms. I watched men and women trimming gorgeous, red fillets into meal-size portions for freezing, then for shipment to markets around the world. I listened to workers explain what they do, and what they’ve learned from the last few years, when an invading virus killed millions of fish, and almost killed the industry.

At each stop, I asked questions about our perceptions of farmed salmon, about antibiotics and Omega 3 fatty acids and food coloring.

Industry leaders, of course, assure us that all is well. So in recent days, I’ve consulted with several independent experts, including Dr. Mike Rust, aquaculture researcher at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle; Dr. John Forster, a marine biologist and aquaculture expert based in Port Angeles, WA; and Gary Marty, a fisheries expert with the Canadian Agriculture Ministry and a professor at the University of California. Here’s what I’ve learned.

What’s the deal with “color added?” OK, this is one that bugged me. And unnecessarily so, it seems. Wild salmon get their color from eating algae, insects, shrimp or other food containing “astaxanthin,” the same natural pigment that makes carrots orange. Fish farmers achieve the same result by adding minute amounts of astaxanthin, natural or synthetically produced, to the food pellets. “You’ll find the same stuff on the shelf at your local health food store,” Marty reports.

What’s the risk? None, Rust agrees. “It’s also used in poultry, to make egg yolks more yellow. And it’s actually a bit of an antioxidant.”

Are farmed salmon laced with antibiotics? Aquaculture experts explain that antibiotics have been used to ward off diseases that would sicken or kill fish – in precisely the same way they are used in many common foods. The antibiotics are added to the fishfood, primarily in the early, freshwater stages of their development, when the fish are most susceptible to disease. Two years later, when those fish are harvested, there is little or no trace left in the fish.

In Norway and Canada, those antibiotics have been almost completely eliminated, replaced by vaccines which do the same job. Chile’s warmer waters, however, are susceptible to “salmon rickettsial syndrome,” or “SRS,” which affects fish, but not people. So the industry continues to use antibiotics in the early stages, while awaiting a vaccine to ward off the disease.

“Disease is part and parcel of all biology, whether it is apples or corn or salmon,” Forster says. “But it gets more attention because aquaculture tends to fall under the authority of fisheries agencies instead of agriculture.”

Don’t farmed salmon lack the Omega 3 fatty acids, along with all their health benefits? No. The experts agree that the Omega 3 benefits are derived from what fish eat, and that pellet-fed farmed salmon offer as much, and in some cases more of those benefits than wild fish.

If there is an issue of food safety, Marty says, it might be that there is a higher risk of Listeria in farmed fish. In one sampling of Canadian fish, two of 40 tested positive for Listeria – a level similar to poultry and other meats. But Listeria is quickly and efficiently killed by cooking, he adds.

There are risks with any food, he says. “But the benefits of eating farmed salmon far exceed the risks.”

Rust agrees. “I’d have to say that 95 percent of what people think they know about aquaculture salmon is either obsolete, or was not true in the first place.”

And so it goes. There are other issues, of course. Environmental critics contend that those floating mega-farms generate an enormous amount of waste that sifts down through the nets and creates ecological deadzones on the sea bottom. They say that escaped fish pose a risk of competing with native fish. And they argue that fish-farms mine the ocean of important forage fish to be converted into fish-food pellets.

Chile’s salmon farmers now acknowledge that their critics have been right on some issues. The industry grew too fast, packed too many fish into their farms, leaving them susceptible to the virus that nearly brought the industry to its knees just three years ago. But they say they’ve learned their lesson, and are doing a far better job of dealing with the ecosystem they depend on.

Still, the industry is still young. Perhaps the jury is still out on those environmental issues.

But food safety doesn’t appear to be one of them. So, later this month, when my wife and I host a neighborhood gathering, there will be farmed salmon on my barbecue.

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Photos courtesy WarnerHanson

Cover image: Atlantic salmon, most of them weighing four to six pounds, are stacked and ready for processing.

Inside images, top to bottom:

1. A state-of-the-art hatchery near Puerto Mont uses intricate plumbing to continuously recycle its water supply to avoid polluting Chilean lakes.

2. Salmon fillets are processed for shipment to markets in the US, Europe and Japan.

3. Individual salmon portions are weighed before packaging and shipment to overseas markets.

4. Salmon slabs sizzle on the stove in a Chilean restaurant kitchen.

Puerto Montt, Chile — Five years ago, while much of the world teetered toward an epic economic collapse, this bustling fishing port in southern Chile plunged into a crisis of its own. But, instead of a castrophic failure of banking and real estate, Chileans found themselves dealing with an invisible virus that had travelled literally from the opposite end of the earth.

In just two short decades, enterprising Chileans had built a thriving, $3 billion-a-year aquaculture industry, growing salmon in floating pens, processing them in and around Puerto Montt, then shipping their prized fillets off to the US, Japan, Europe and beyond. But in 2007, those pens were infested with a lethal microbe that wiped out millions of fish and threatened to kill the industry.

Now those salmon farms are back; Chile expects a new production record this year – a staggering 700,000 metric tons of Atlantic and Pacific salmon. Along the way, enterprising fish farmers learned some essential lessons about the risks surrounding microbiology and the recurring “tragedy of the commons.”

For most of the 20th century, Puerto Montt was a small, ramshackle seaport perched on a verdant ledge between an inland Patagonian fjord and the dramatic volcanoes of the southern Andes. It’s a lush, rain-soaked region resembling the northwest coast, sparsely populated with the descendants of the native Mapuche natives and German immigrants who arrived in the first half of the 19th century.

Then, in the mid ’80s, Chile learned that their plankton-rich, inland waters were ideal habitat for salmon aquaculture – even though there were no native salmon runs in Patagonia or anywhere else in the southern hemisphere. Using eggs and technology imported from the U.S. and Norway, they hatched and grew juvenile fish in local freshwater lakes, then transferred them to floating netpens, many of them along the shores of rural Chilhoe Island, south of the port city.

Fueled initially by Japanese investment, dozens of huge fish farms sprouted along Patagonian shores. The industry grew at a phenomenal rate averaging 25 percent per year. In 1990, Chilean farms exported nearly $100 million worth of salmon to Japan, the US and Europe. By 2000, it was $1 billion. Six years later, it was $2 billion.

U.S. buyers included Walmart and Costco, both of which sold Chilean salmon by the truckload.

Puerto Montt became a boomtown, employing some 35,000 people at the farms, processing plants, and fish food factories that converted fish waste and other raw materials into pellets. Construction boomed as well, with processing plants, thousands of homes for newly arrived workers, and a modern office building with a two-story underground shopping mall.

“The growth was much faster than the government could keep up with,” says Carlos Odebret of Salmon Chile, a trade group for the industry. “The challenge was to bring people in from other parts of the country.”

As the profits mounted, the companies kept building more and more fish farms – steel grids, comprised of 10 or more pens per complex, adding up to floating farms that cover an area the size of three football fields.

But aquaculture experts and environmentalists worried that they were growing too fast, taking too many shortcuts with the complex science of fish farming. There were too many farms, packed with too many fish, and not enough biological precautions.

“Salmon farming is starting to transform the ecology and environment of southern Chile, with tens of millions of salmon living in vast ocean corrals,” wrote environmental writer Charles Fishman. “Who could have predicted that the mass forced farming of an exotic fish to please the Wal-Mart low-price palate would result in a horrific virus-borne plague?”

Adolfo Alvial, a softspoken marine biologist widely respected in the industry, worried that it was all happening too fast. In July, 2007, he took a job with Marine Harvest, one of the world’s biggest aquaculture companies. At his first meeting, he was told the company “has an ISA situation” at one of its farms.

Infectious salmon anemia, better known as “ISA” is a virus closely related to influenza. It does not affect humans, but it is lethal to salmon, and especially to the Atlantic salmon which dominated Chile’s fish farms. It had previously infected salmon farms in Norway and Scotland, but this was Chile’s first experience with the disease.

The ISA quickly became an epidemic. Millions of fish died, and millions more had to be destroyed in an attempt to prevent its spread.

The infected eggs probably came from Norway, but the epidemic was worsened by the fish-farmers’ rapid growth and lax standards.

More than 13,000 people lost their jobs, forcing many to pack up their families and migrate north in search of work. “So it was also a social crisis for the region,” says Odebret. “We didn’t understand how important our industry was to the community. Now we do.”

The low point came in 2010, when Atlantic salmon production dropped to half of its 2008 peak.

But the fish farmers have recovered remarkably fast, due to a combination of strategies. Among them:

– They shifted much of their production to Pacific salmon, Northwest coho and closely related steelhead trout, which are more resistant to ISA. The record 2012 exports will be comprised of half Atlantics and half Pacific species.

– The density of the farms has been cut by half, and the number of farms in the Puerto Montt region has been frozen; future development will occur in areas to the south where there has been limited aquaculture.

– The aquaculture companies have adopted strict, new “bio-security” measures at the farms and processing plants. Individual farms are isolated from each other, with no movement of fish between them. At each stage in the process, workers wear disposable gowns and rubber boots with cleaning stations and foot disinfectant pools at critical points. The processing plants now resemble surgical wards, with workers draped completely in clean, disposable gear.

– With the support of the industry, the government has instituted strict new rules for fish farms, with more frequent inspections and biological monitoring.

– New hatcheries are coming on line using self-contained water supplies that are less subject to contamination.

Adolfo Alvial, who watched it all happen, believes the industry now understands the so-called “tragedy of the commons” – the economic principle that people who make their livings by exploiting a common resource do not have an incentive to take care of it. In the case of commercial fishing, that means fishermen will knowingly catch the last salmon because, if they don’t, somebody else will. In the case of aquaculture, it means fish farmers will keep producing more and more fish until the ecosystem collapses.

“We blamed the ISA virus on eggs imported from Norway,” Alvial says. “But the real problem was overcrowded conditions in our pens. We weren’t paying attention to the long term effects of these mega-farms.”

Scientists now understand that the oceans are made up of interrelated ecosystems. And any ecosystem has a carrying capacity, an ill-defined capacity for how much life can be sustained by the available food and oxygen.

“It’s human nature,” Alvial says. “We were so arrogant. This little country in South America showing the world how to build a world class aquaculture system. And we weren’t listening to the people who were telling us: You’re taking too many risks, not enough research, not enough regulation.

“So it may have started with a single lot of eggs from Norway, or a single boat or a single net… But we can’t blame our crisis on a few contaminated eggs. We have to blame it on our lack of knowledge of the carrying capacity.”

Fortunately, he says, the same entrepreneurial spirit that built the industry was marshaled to respond to the crisis. “We are a very opportunistic country.”

(Tomorrow: Farmed salmon vs. wild salmon – a religious question?)

Images courtesy WarnerHansen

Cover image: Millions of salmon are hatched in freshwater hatcheries and raised for the first few months before being transferred to floating saltwater pens.

Top to bottom images: 

1. The surface of a floating netpen boils with hungry salmon when automatic feeders spring into action, flinging food pellets out like a lawn sprinkler.

2. Individual salmon portions are prepared for freezing and vacuum packaging, bound for US markets.

3. Workers draped in sanitary outfits prepare salmon in a Puerto Mont-area processing plant.

4. Individual salmon portions are brined in preparation for smoking at a Chilean plant.

And some thought it was government overreach.  “If churches have to get a permit for a potluck or a lutefisk supper, what’s next?” asked a newspaper columnist. “A requirement that parishioners wear rubber gloves when sharing the peace?”

Who would disagree?  But the tea party outrage turned out to be a classic tempest in a teapot, a political tantrum based on bad information. 

Minnesota had no desire to regulate church potlucks, but it public health experts were trying to help churches deal with larger events that are susceptible to foodborne illness. “We’d had these requirements for years, but people weren’t aware of it,” explains Deborah Durkin, a planner and educator for the state Department of Health.

What people needed was information. And now, a year later, hundreds of Minnesota “church ladies” have been trained in food safety as part of a compromise “church lady law” passed by the state legislature last summer.

Most states studiously avoid any regulation of church potlucks and bake sales – for obvious reasons. Dr. Kirk Smith, chief epidemiologist for the highly respected Minnesota state health department, grew up in rural North Dakota, so he understands the role fried chicken, spaghetti dinners and green Jello potlucks play in American culture.

“I’ve been to a million of those dinners,” he says, and he has neither the desire nor the manpower to regulate kitchens at some 10,000 churches across the state.

But Smith also knows that church dinners can make people sick. And that usually happens when the Sunday afternoon potluck grows into something far bigger – fundraisers designed to attract hundreds of people.

None of this is hypothetical. Like other states, Minnesota has a history of mini-epidemics traced to church events. In 2006, some 300 people showed up for a smorgasbord at the Salem Lutheran Church in Longville, a lakeside town in northern Minnesota that could have been the inspiration for Garrison Kielor’s Lake Wobegon.

At least 17 people were sickened with E. coli  traced to undercooked meatballs.Three developed hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), and a 73-year-old woman died.

Similar outbreaks, small and large, occur every year. In 2007, 20 were sickenened after a church festival that drew more than 1,000 people; the contamination was traced to improperly stored pork. The following year, nearly a third of the 585 guests at a church-sponsored turkey dinner were sickened because nobody had taken temperature readings from the cooked birds.

 “Outbreaks tend to happen when untrained volunteers are preparing large amounts of food for a lot of people,” Smith says. “I think people get overwhelmed.”

Few churches, for example, have ovens capable of cooking more than one or two turkeys at a time.  So volunteer cooks are tempted to take shortcuts that may compromise food safety.

Based on that experience, Minnesota’s food safety laws kick in when churches reach out beyond their own membership, especially when they’re trying to raise money. Even in those cases, the strategy is to make sure churches have one or more people trained in basic food safety. Over the past five years or so, officials had tried several times to reach out to churches, offering day-long training sessions on food safety, Durkin says. But they got few takers.

Last year, they tried again. But this time they offered a video conference, making it easier for people to participate. And the program took off.

Word started to spread, and some churches set up food safety teams. “It was great,” Durkin said. “It turned out that people had been wanting this for years.”

But some of the information got skewed, especially when an insurance company sent out a “risk alert,” warning churches that bake sales would be affected.

There was a brief flurry of outrage. But eventually, state legislators approved a bill that clearly exempted potlucks and bake sales from state health inspections, while allowing health officials to train church volunteers in the basics of food safety. 

The bottom line is a compromise that health officials believe will reduce the risk of church-related foodborne illness — and could be adopted elsewhere.

“Everybody seems to be happy,” Durkin says.”We’ve sent out 850 DVDS of our video conference and people keep asking for more…

“We had one parish nurse who took the training and told us: ‘This is so cool, I’m going to help train all the churches in town – even the Catholics!’ “

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To access some of the food safety resources Minnesota has developed go here. To see the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Kitchen Companion: Your Safe Food Handbook” go here. PowerPoint presentations from a Minnesota workshop and a sample kitchen manual for church kitchens are available online at http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/food/pwdu/fsp/

That’s the gist of a survey by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose results were published in the February edition of the Journal of Food Protection.

Thousands of Americans have been sickened, and hundreds have died in recent years due to E. coli O157:H7 or other bacteria in undercooked ground beef traced to a variety of sources – from grocery stores to fast-food restaurants. Beef can become contaminated by cow feces at slaughterhouses or at other processing stages, and pathogenic bacteria can become interspersed throughout the meat when it is ground.

Consumers have been advised repeatedly that cooking hamburger thoroughly will kill harmful bacteria.

The CDC survey suggests that many Americans continue to ignore those warnings.

According to the CDC researchers, 8,543 consumers in 10 American regions were interviewed about their attitudes toward ground beef.  Of those, 75 percent reported eating ground beef at home, and 18 percent of them said the hamburger was pink when they ate it.

Extrapolated to the American public at large, that suggests that some 40 million Americans have consumed undercooked hamburger in their homes.

Researchers said men and people of medium incomes ($40,000 to $75,000)  were more likely to eat pink meat, as were people with graduate degrees. People over age 65 were less likely to eat hamburgers served rare.

Overall consumption of ground beef has not changed in recently surveys, the researchers report.

The authors note that their study had several limitations, including self-reported questionnaire responses, and no questions on consumption of pink ground beef prepared outside the home. Also, color is not a completely reliable indicator of ground beef doneness. Ground beef patties not only can turn brown well before they reach 160 °F, but some lean ground beef will remain pink well above the 160 °F final cooking temperature.

The safest way to test for doneness is with a tip sensitive digital thermometer. The questionnaire did not ask about thermometer use.

A month later, their investigations had focused on fresh tomatoes, sliced and consumed in a variety of restaurants. And the tomatoes were, in turn, traced to a packing house in Ohio. Case closed.

As outbreaks go, that outbreak was not terribly unusual.  About 190 people were known to have been sickened across 21 states, mostly in the upper Midwest and New England.  Twenty-four were hospitalized.  (The actual number of sick people could have been as many as 6,000, the CDC says.)

But that outbreak has continued to draw attention from epidemiologists, most recently with a research paper published by officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  And it has drawn attention precisely because it was not unusual.

In October, 2006, health officials had little to go on – clusters of sick people across several states with matching genetic analysis, but no obvious cause.  The response was what researchers call a “dynamic, iterative process of hypothesis generation” – intensive interviews with sickened people, asking what they had eaten in the week before their illness.  The interviews touched on more than 300 possible food items. 

The objective is to come up with a “hypothetical” cause, a single food item that had been consumed by all or most of the cases.

Initially, the results merely suggested that the sick people had all eaten in restaurants – but not at the same restaurant. In fact, the eateries ranged from a fast-food burger joint to a gourmet delicatessen. So interviewers called the victims back, asking specifically what they ate.

Tomatoes. Big, round tomatoes, sliced for sandwiches or salads.

Armed with that hypothesis, officials questioned managers at the restaurants, and learned their tomatoes all came from a single packing house in Ohio. Alas, the packer had closed down for the winter, and the suspect fields had been planted with other crops. There was no recall. The epidemiology ended in the fields of Ohio.

This, researchers point out, underscores one of the obstacles to tracking bacteria in tomatoes and other produce. Tomatoes have a shelf life of about a month; so, by the time health investigators focus on a potential culprit, the offending food is likely to have been consumed or discarded. That means there is no opportunity for genetic testing of the suspect food.

But the problem remains, and people continue to get sick.

There was a time when Salmonella was popularly identified mostly with uncooked chicken or other poultry.   Over the past two decades, however, outbreaks have been linked to virtually every uncooked food imaginable, and tomatoes have become – and probably always were – a popular vehicle for the bacterium.

Americans eat about 5 billion pounds of fresh tomatoes per year – about 16 pounds per person. (A similar amount is cooked.) The CDC reports three or four outbreaks per year linked to tomatoes. So the odds of getting sickened are quite remote.

But not as remote as they should be, researchers say. Fresh tomatoes  can be contaminated by domestic or wild animals in the fields or in the packing houses, or by unclean irrigation water. And, once contaminated, they serve as “an efficient medium for bacterial amplification,” the CDC report warns.

Food researchers are trying to understand the problem better. A Florida study suggests for instance that oblong-shaped Roma tomatoes appear to be more susceptible to bacteria than round Romas. Another study says green tomatoes are less friendly to bugs. But nobody knows why.

Still another study seemed to suggest that tomatoes coated with a harmless bacterium were less likely to be contaminated with Salmonella – possibly because the Salmonella didn’t take well to competition.

The 2006 outbreak underscored the fact that tomatoes, like other uncooked food, can be hazardous, researchers said.  And  the hazards are not limited to industrial farms in Florida or California; Salmonella contamination is just as likely to emerge from a small farm in Virginia or Ohio.  “These outbreaks suggest that the problem is not localized to one particular region,” they report.

Contamination, they add, is “probably occurring early in the distribution chain, such as at the farm or packing house, rather than at multiple restaurants.”

Snow doubted the prevailing belief that disease was spread by breathing “bad air.” He noted that the disease was centered near a public water pump on Broad Street. The water in that area, he argued, was polluted by sewage, while people in other neighborhoods who drank from unpolluted wells, were unaffected.

When the handle was removed from the suspect pump, the epidemic ebbed. And Snow had demonstrated that cholera is spread not by air, but by food or water.

Snow’s work came as Louis Pasteur and other pioneers were beginning to probe the microbial world of bacteria. Together, they helped establish the new science of epidemiology, the study of disease and how it is transmitted.

Today, epidemiology consists of two fundamental processes. One is in the lab, where scientists chase microbes using microscopes and, more recently, high-tech genetic analysis.

The other, perhaps more prosaic process is fieldwork, variations on the case-control study pioneered by John Snow. This consists of observing or interviewing sick people, noting what they have eaten or experienced, and comparing those results with similar people who are not sick.  If sick people have consumed food or water that healthy people have not, one can establish a statistical probability for the cause of the outbreak.  

Epidemiologists have used case-control studies for more than a century, tracing the sources of countless epidemics of food poisoning and other illnesses. Perhaps the best-known examples were studies in Britain and the U.S. in the 1950s that showed that tobacco smoking was by far the most common cause of lung cancer.

Yet, after 150 years of experience, not everyone is impressed with the validity of the case-control study.  Witness California advocates of unpasteurized milk who contested epidemiology that pointed to Organic Pastures raw milk as the probable source of a recent outbreak of E.coli O157:H7. While interviews with all five young victims pointed to raw milk, investigators didn’t find contaminated milk — not surprising given the weeks-long time lag between when someone becomes infected, and when tests are conducted.

Sometimes a contaminated product isn’t available to be tested following an outbreak of illness.

Until environmental tests of the dairy came back positive for the outbreak strain of E. coli O157:H7, raw milk advocates had argued that health officials had not made their case, despite the overwhelming epidemiologic evidence.

Last year, executives at Del Monte Fresh Produce, a major distributor of fruits and vegetables, took that inconclusive-proof argument to great lengths, challenging health authorities who contend that at least 20 people in 10 states were sickened with Salmonella poisoning attributed to cantaloupe imported by Del Monte and sold at Costco warehouses.

They believe they were falsely accused of responsibility, and that the resulting recall damaged the company unjustly. “It’s got to be a comprehensive and reliable investigation, and in our opinion this was neither” Del Monte executive Dennis Christou told the New York Times.

This claim is based on lab tests that showed no Salmonella – no smoking gun.

Del Monte’s aggressive response drew cheers from some in the food industry, frustrated by federal regulators who insist on recalls. Food recalls, justified or not, cost companies millions of dollars – not to mention the associated bad publicity. 

The dispute goes back nearly a year ago, when state and federal health officials detected a spike in cases of Salmonella Panama, a rather rare bacterium that causes severe diarrhea.

Dr. Bill Keene, a nationally known and respected epidemiologist in Oregon’s health department, was one of the scientists who worked on the case. Detailed interviews with victims showed that all or most had eaten cantaloupe.  Investigators then tracked the suspect melons to a Guatemala farm that supplies Del Monte Fresh Produce.

Cantaloupes from the same farm were taken to a lab for pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), a process that identifies a genotype, or genetic fingerprint. If stool samples from sick people show the same genetic fingerprint, scientists can establish with near certainty that they were sickened by the same food.

The cantaloupe, however, tested negative for Salmonella. And that is the basis for Del Monte’s “not guilty” plea.

Not so fast, say the epidemiologists.The case-control studies still pointed to Del Monte. PFGE analysis is a powerful scientific tool, but so is the more traditional case-control investigation pioneered by John Snow.

“It would be great if we could just buy the product, take it to the lab and find Salmonella,” Keene explained in an interview last spring. “That’s something anybody can understand.  But when you offer up P values and probabilities, people want to say: ‘That’s statistical mumbo jumbo.’ “

It often takes weeks for outbreaks of food poisoning to be detected by health authorities. By that time, the offending food — especially if it is a perishable product — is likely to have been consumed, discarded or no longer on store shelves. So, as often as not, the tainted food is simply no longer available to be tested. And that was the case with the Del Monte outbreak.

However, the lab work can show that these sick people were stricken by the same genetic strain of Salmonella, so it can be assumed they were sickened by the same food product.

Sick people, or “case patients,” are carefully questioned about what they have eaten over previous days and weeks. If all or most of your cases ate cantaloupe, epidemiologists are onto something.  Even if one or two of your victims doesn’t remember eating cantaloupe, they may have eaten something that was prepared on the same surface and contaminated by tainted melon.

The next step is to establish the background rate. What is the likelihood that people will have eaten cantaloupe?  If, for example, the background rate is 30 percent, epidemiologists can calculate the statistical probability that the outbreak was caused by tainted cantaloupe.  That doesn’t make it a certainty, but the probability is in the same statistical range as a positive lab test.

“Everybody loves lab results,” Keene said last spring. “Me too. Nobody sends more stuff to the lab than I do.”

But, from a scientific and legal standpoint, a case-control study is just as powerful, he says.

Keene’s work on the cantaloupe outbreak was “a high quality study,” says Dr. Mike Osterholm, nationally known epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP).

“Case-control is a time-tested approach, an extremely effective method for identifying a product.”

While he understands Del Monte’s frustration, the company “clearly lacks the sophistication to understand the epidemiology here,” Osterholm says. “For them to question this science is like saying you can’t convict a murderer unless you have video of the crime being committed.”

Epidemiologists are not infallible. Osterholm painfully recalls the 2008 Salmonella epidemic that was initially blamed on tomatoes. Investigators later shifted the focus to jalapeno peppers — perhaps peppers used in tomato salsa — but by that time tomato farmers were economically clobbered.

“The FDA can be wrong, and the shattered tomato industry had no place to go to get back its reputation, or its financial losses,” food industry blogger Jim Prevor wrote in recalling that mistake.

But high-tech lab work can lead officials astray as well.  Osterholm points out that Germany’s frightening outbreak of E. coli O104 last spring was initially traced to cucumbers that tested positive for  pathogenic E. coli.  But further tests showed the E. coli was not the outbreak strain; and it was the case-control studies that eventually led the investigators to the real culprit – sprouts grown from contaminated seeds.

The science that led investigators to Del Monte cantaloupe is solid, Osterholm insists.  “Epidemiology is NOT on trial in this case.  To say that would give too much weight to what’s going on here.”

Those who don’t want to believe epidemiology, however, remain deeply doubtful of case-control studies.

So did English decision makers 150 years ago when, after London’s cholera epidemic subsided, the handle was replaced on the Broad Street pump. Nobody will ever know how many innocent Londoners were sickened because people chose to ignore John Snow’s case-control study.

That’s the bottom line of a study published this week in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Bushmeat describes meat parts from exotic African wildlife species, including baboons and chimpanzees, rats and other rodent species – strange products that have found mostly-illegal markets across the U.S.

Laboratory analysis of samples confiscated at New York’s JFK Airport and other U.S. airports showed that many of those exotic wildlife products carry equally exotic microbes, including zoonotic retrovirus, simian foamy viruses and several nonhuman primate herpesviruses.

“Exotic wildlife; pets and bushmeat are Trojan horses that threaten humankind at sites where they are collected in the developing world as well as the U.S.,” said Ian Lipkin, of Columbia University’s School of Public Health, which participated in the study.

Other participants included the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) , EcoHealth Alliance and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

A previous EcoHealth study concluded that 1.5 billion live wild animals, from snakes and lizards to baboons and chimpanzees, were imported to the U.S. over the six-year period from 2000-2006. Most of them were headed for the exotic pet market.

In addition, U.S. Fish and Wildlife says that 55  million pounds of bushmeat and other wildlife products flow into the U.S. each year – most of it arriving at New York City, Miami or Los Angeles.

The CDC conducted a pilot study designed to get a sense of the risks that travel with those illegal imports. The study was based on a relatively small sampling of confiscated products, which included “parts originating from nonhuman primate and rodent species, including baboon, chimpanzee, mangabey, guenon, green monkey, cane rat and rat.”

Simian foamy virus, which is closely related to Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which can lead to AIDS, was present in 3 of 10 baboon samples.

“These results are the first demonstration that illegal bushmeat importation into the U.S. could act as a conduit for pathogen spread,” the researchers reported.

They stressed that 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases originate with wildlife. One example was the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003, which began in southwest China and eventually spread to 29 other  countries, sickening more than 8,000 people and killing 774. Most of the early cases of infection were among restaurant workers who bought and butchered masked palm civets traded in the markets of Guangdong.

Illegal wildlife imports come from China, the Phillippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nigeria and many other countries, the study says. Much of the bushmeat smuggled from Africa passes through Europe.

A separate study estimated that 273 tons of bushmeat is coming into France via Air France carriers alone.

In addition to direct health risks to consumers, wildlife imports pose a risk to domestic agriculrure, wildlife and livestock, the authors conclude.

However, the authors also cautioned that the pilot study was limited in scope and was “not intended to be a comprehensive review of presence or to measure prevalence of all pathogens imported in wildlife products.”

For example, the study did not even examine major wildlife groups such as birds and reptiles.

Still, the findings suggest a need for “broader surveillance” at U.S. ports of entry, the authors wrote.

The statistical study compared food-poisoning data in the years before and after imposition of the sometimes-controversial Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program in the mid-1990s.

Previous studies had concluded that HACCP (pronounced “hassip”)  programs in poultry processing plants had reduced the incidence of Salmonella in broilers by more than 50 percent.  But the new study asked the follow-up question: Did the new safety measures actually prevent outbreaks of food poisoning?

And the study — published in Foodborne Pathogens and Disease — concludes that it did, resulting in far few cases of Salmonella infection across the nation.

Chicken carcasses have long been understood to be a high risk for Salmonella poisoning. While thorough cooking to 165°F can kill the harmful pathogen, raw chicken and its juices can cross-contaminate other foods and food-prep surfaces, so ideally chicken shouldn’t be contaminated in the first place.

The HACCP program, introduced in stages between 1996 and 2000, identified points in the processing plant where the poultry is especially prone to contamination.  Armed with that information, processors were able to alter their operations to reduce the risk.

The new study, by Michael Williams and Eric D. Ebel at the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service, used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other health agencies to analyze the effects of the safety programs.

The authors estimated that about 190,000 fewer people were sickened with Salmonella between 1996 and 2000.

Subsequent improvements in infections rates have been far more modest, presumedly because HACCP programs had been in place for some time, the authors said.

The HACCP program dates to the 1960s, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) asked the Pillsbury Company to help develop a safe food system for astronauts, with food safety being a high priority. Pillsbury scientists studied food-processing and transport, identifying the points at which food was most likely to become contaminated with Salmonella or other microbes.

At the same time, the U.S. food-processing industry was growing much faster than government inspectors could keep up with. So the government applied what NASA had learned to the food industry in general.

While reports of Salmonella outbreaks have increased in recent years, health officials report that the actual incidence of food poisoning has declined.  And the new FSIS study suggests strongly that HACCP is one of the reasons for that decline.

Each year there are about 40,000 lab-confirmed cases of salmonellosis reported in the U.S., and about 400 of those people die. Because people with milder cases may not seek medical treatment, of if they do they may not be screened for Salmonella, the CDC estimates the actual number of infections may be 30 or more times greater. Children younger than five are the most vulnerable to the disease.

In 2010, Consumer Reports found Salmonella in 14 percent of the supermarket chicken it tested.  Last year, the Institute for Environmental Health (IEH) tested 100 retail chickens at the request of the food-safety law firm Marler Clark, sponsor of Food Safety News. Nineteen percent of the samples tested positive for Salmonella.

Of 13 organic chickens tested by the IEH lab, four were positive for Salmonella, indicating poultry processing is problematic whether or not the chicken is raised on industrial-scale farms.

Under stricter standards that went into effect in July, no more than 7.5 percent of raw chicken carcasses can test positive for Salmonella. The previous tolerance level was 20 percent.

Doctors at the French Institute for Public Health Surveillance (Institut de Veille Sanitaire) summarized the results of a major study of French listeriosis patients, concluding that pregnant women and cancer patients are far more at risk than the population at large.

Based on their review of  nearly 2,000 listeria cases, leukemia patients were 1,000 times more likely to contract the disease, researchers said.

As a result, researchers concluded that, to prevent Listeria outbreaks, health officials should target their efforts on populations at higher risk – especially pregnant women and cancer patients. In particular, at-risk people should avoid foods that are susceptible to Listeria.

The study incorporated 1,959 listeria cases in France from 2001 to 2008.  In addition to the leukemia patients, it  identified higher risks for people living with liver cancer, multiple myeloma, and cancers of the esophagus, stomach, pancreas, lung and brain.  Pregnant women and people who had undergone organ transplants also faced risks ranging from 100 to 1,000 times greater than the population at large.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people at higher risk for Listeria avoid the following foods:

— Hot dogs, luncheon meats, cold cuts, other deli meats (such as bologna), or fermented or dry sausages unless they are first heated to an internal temperature of 165°F or until steaming hot just before serving. Also avoid refrigerated pâté or meat spreads.

— Soft cheese such as feta, queso blanco, queso fresco, brie, Camembert, blue-veined, or panela (queso panela) unless it is labeled as made with pasteurized milk.

— Refrigerated smoked seafood such as salmon, trout, whitefish, cod, tuna, and mackerel (often labeled as nova-style, lox, kippered, smoked, or jerky) unless it is contained in a cooked dish, such as a casserole, or unless it is a canned or shelf-stable product.

Until this year, Listeria had not been detected in cantaloupes — then Listeria-contaminated melons sickened 146, killing 30 and causing at least one miscarriage. The FDA recommends washing one’s hands with warm water and soap for at least 20 seconds before and after handling any whole melon, such as cantaloupe, watermelon, or honeydew. Scrub the surface of melons with a clean produce brush under running water and dry them with a clean cloth or paper towel before cutting. Be sure that your scrub brush is sanitized after each use, to avoid transferring bacteria between melons.

Promptly consume cut melon or refrigerate promptly. Keep cut melon refrigerated at, or less than 40 degrees F (32-34 degrees F is best), for no more than 7 days. Discard cut melons left at room temperature for more than 4 hours.

The FDA agreed to the deadline as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of many consumer and environmental groups that advocate banning BPA in food packaging.

Three years ago, the NRDC petitioned the FDA to ban the use of BPA in food packaging.  When the FDA failed to respond, the environmental advocacy group filed suit, asking the court to force the agency to respond.

BPA is widely used to help seal packaged foods, including the linings of food and drink cans, and in many plastics. The chemical has been heavily studied, and while most regulatory agencies here and abroad have not found that it impacts human health, some critics believe that evidence shows it to be a dangerous chemical unfit for consumption.

“Every day, millions of American consumers are exposed to this dangerous chemical, commonly used in packaging for canned foods, beverages and even baby formula,” said Dr. Sarah Janssen, senior scientist at the NRDC. 

“The FDA has an obligation to protect us from toxic food additives. As thousands of studies have already shown, BPA is a dangerous chemical that has no place in the food chain.  It’s use in food and beverage containers needs to be banned.”

Last year, the FDA said it had some concerns about BPA’s effects on babies and young children, and that it was reasonable to reduce their exposure to BPA. But the agency also has maintained that research does not support the arguments made by NRDC and other critics.  The agency has said that evidence suggests the chemical can be used safely in the interior linings of canned food.

Despite research suggesting there is no health risk through dietary exposure, some U.S. companies say they already have stopped using BPA in children’s products and water bottles, a response to consumer demands as well as state legislation.

But the controversy rages on – in the U.S., Canada and across Europe.

This weeks’s settlement does not indicate that the FDA agrees with the NRDC, but rather requires the agency to respond by March 31, 2012.

An NRC committee made up of agriculture experts and food safety advocates studied the possible consequences of publishing such detailed information on the Internet, and concluded that it could introduce a new incentive for processors to avoid disease-causing contaminants.

The federal Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) samples meat, poultry and eggs, looking for harmful contaminants. Information from those inspections and enforcement findings has previously been available to consumers and consumer advocacy groups primarily through the time-consuming Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process. 

But FSIS has been considering whether to post on its website certain types of data from those inspections, including results of tests for foodborne pathogens such as Listeria, pathogenic E. coli or Salmonella.

The 97-page NRC report, released Wednesday, comes from a panel of independent scientists whose findings were subjected to peer review. Their report appears to clear the way for publishing such information in the future. The committee noted that there are good arguments that support the release of data, including the names of specific meat, poultry and egg processing plants.  

Making such data public would enable consumers to make more informed choices about what foods to purchase, while motivating processors to improve their food safety performance, the committee said. It would also make information more readily available to epidemiologists and researchers.

The NRC report drew immediate praise from consumer groups. Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety specialist at the Committee for Science in the Public Interest, called it “a major step forward in the quest for a truly transparent food system.”

“CSPI has used FSIS data in the past to give consumers advice on which plants produced turkeys with the lowest rates of Salmonella,” she added.  “But in subsequent years we found it impossible to access usable data from FSIS to update those recommendations.”

The Research Council report underscores the argument that full disclosure of inspection data could have important benefits to public health.

However, the committee also acknowledged some downsides to full disclosure. Companies could be damaged by poor or inaccurate inspection reports. Data could be misinterpreted by consumers, and publication could put additional pressure on government inspectors.

But, on balance, the committee concluded that food safety would be enhanced by full disclosure.

 “Although the literature suggests that disclosure of information about the performance of a specific facility has the potential to affect the facility’s profitability,” the committee wrote, “it is precisely this possibility that creates an incentive for improved performance, which would constitute a benefit from the perspective of the public.”

FSIS should consult with other agencies, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Labor, which already disclose regulatory data, the panel recommended. The group also noted that many local public health departments regularly release the results of restaurant inspections.

The Committee on the Study of Food Safety and Other Consequences of Publishing Establishment-Specific Data, was chaired by Lee-Ann Jaykus, professor, Department of Food, Bioprocessing, and Nutritional Sciences, North Carolina State University. 

Other members of the panel were: Julie A. Caswell, professor and chair, Department of Resource Economics University of Massachusetts; James S. Dickson, professor, Department of Animal Science, Iowa State University; John R. Dunn, deputy state epidemiologist, Communicable and Environmental Disease Services, Tennessee Department of Health; Stephen E. Fienberg, Maurice Falk University professor of Statistics and Social Science, Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University; William K. Hallman, professor and director, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University.

Also Ginger Z. Jin, associate professor, Department of Economics, University of Maryland; Gale Prince, consultant, Food Safety Management and Regulation, SAGE Food Safety Consultants LLC; Donald W. Schaffner, extension specialist in Food Science and professor, Department of Food Science, Rutgers University; Kathleen Segerson, professor, Department of Economics, University of Connecticut; Christopher A. Waldrop, director, Food Policy Institute, Consumer Federation of America; and David Weil, professor, School of Management, Boston University.

“FDA monitoring has found that total arsenic levels in apple juice are typically low,” according to Michael Landa, acting director of the FDA”s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

Landa reached that conclusion in a lengthy letter last week to two consumer groups, Food and Water Watch and the Empire State Consumer Project, which are campaigning for standards for arsenic and other heavy metals in apple products.

The letter also states that in addition to its continued monitoring of imported apple juice, the agency will collect and analyze juice samples from U.S. retailers to determine “the prevalence of arsenic in juice and to better understand the species of arsenic found in juice.” 

The issue got attention earlier this year when The Dr. Oz Show publicized results of private tests showing arsenic levels higher than the FDA level of concern (23 parts per billion) in a number popular brands of apple juice.  FDA officials publicly rebutted those claims, but declined to appear on the TV show.

Arsenic and apple juice have become a recurring theme in food safety politics. Consumer groups point out that most U.S. apple juice is imported from China and other countries, and they fear some of it may be tainted with arsenic and other heavy metals.

In his letter, Landa said the agency has increased its monitoring of imported juices. In one recent sampling, all 74  samples collected had originated in China.  But only one of those samples tested slightly above 23 ppb of total arsenic.  Most of the samples – 95 percent – tested below 10 ppb total arsenic, Landa reported.

Tests of Motts apple juice, commissioned by the Empire State Consumer Project, had shown arsenic levels as high as 55 ppb.  But those tests “seemed inconsistent with the vast majority of the test results we have seen in the last two decades,” Landa said.

So the agency collected and tested additional samples of Chinese apple juice from the Mott’s plant in New York, and those tests showed arsenic levels between 4 ppb and 8 ppb – a fraction of what the consumer group had found.

Similarly, the FDA tested juice from the same Nestle/Gerber lot that the TV program had shown to contain 36 ppb total arsenic, but the FDA tests showed arsenic levels ranging from 2 to 6 ppb.

The FDA previously has stressed the importance of distinguishing between organic and inorganic arsenic.  Organic arsenic is considered part of the natural environment, present in small amounts in drinking water and foods and essentially harmless, while inorganic arsenic is the poison made famous by mystery writer Agatha Christie.

In the letter to Food & Water Watch and the Empire State Consumer Project, Landa said the FDA has ordered its field force to collect and analyze up to 90 baby food and apple juice samples by the end of the year. It also will focus on arsenic measurement in other types of juices.

The letter also said “in the event we find a contaminant in a food that poses a health hazard, such that the food is deemed to be adulterated, we can and intend to take appropriate enforcement action.”

Responding to the consumer groups’ request that FDA set tolerance levels for heavy metals, including arsenic, in apple products, Landa said such an action requires “formal rulemaking and is a lengthy process,” and that tolerance levels, once established, are difficult to change.

“For those reasons, FDA almost never uses tolerances for chemical contaminants, and instead considers other limits such as levels of concern or guidance or other levels,” Landa wrote. But he said agency officials are “seriously considering setting guidance or other level for inorganic apple juice and are collecting all relevant information to evaluate and determine an appropriate level.”

An FDA warning, released at the close of business Friday, advised consumers not to eat frozen, shucked oysters packed in three-pound bags and labeled ASSI brand “INDIVIDUALLY QUICK FROZEN OYSTER” and a “Better if used by” date in 2013.  The company said the oysters were shipped to western states, including California, Colorado, Arizona, Idaho, Utah and Texas.

Washington state health officials identified three people who were sickened after eating oysters at a restaurant in King County, home county to Seattle. The restaurant was not identified.

None of the  three people was hospitalized. Norovirus usually begins suddenly and causes one or two days of vomiting and diarrhea, but rarely requires hospitalization.

The FDA said the oysters originated in Korea and were shucked and frozen. Each bag identifies Central Fisheries Co. Ltd. as the packer and Korean Farms of Santa Fe Springs, CA, as the distributor.

Korean Farms has agreed to recall the suspect oysters.

Once upon a time, the tomato was synonymous with summer, a juicy and flavorful fruit that enticed: Eat now, for tomorrow ye may die. A native of South America, it was the New World’s gift to the Old World, where Italian cuisine made it famous.

Then came the fall.  Over the past few decades, the tomato’s genes have been tweaked, nudged, prodded, turned upside down and inside out, then moved in mass to Florida so that crops can be harvested and sold all year.

The result is vaguely red, readily available, and cheap. It can be shipped anywhere by the tens of thousands with little risk of spoilage.  But it is also tasteless, with the consistency of a tennis ball; squeeze one, and the flesh bounces right back like rubber.  It has shelf life, and little more.

Barry Estabrook recounts this sad transformation in his new book, Tomatoland (Andrews McMeel Publishing, $19.95). And he brings to the story both the keen observations and easy writing of a veteran journalist, plus the knowledge and lust of a passionate foodie.  Estabrook makes it a journey, and takes his reader with him.

Alas, the genetic transformation is merely the first stop. Estabrook takes us to the Florida fields which have one thing going for them — year-round sun.  But to grow tomatoes in Florida, farmers need to drench those fields in a chemical soup of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides — $2,000 worth per acre per crop, five times more than the same tomatoes would get in California.

There is some debate over how much of the stuff remains on the product when it reaches the neighborhood supermarket, or our dinner tables.  But we probably don’t want to know.

As the tour continues, the news gets worse. In order to get those enormous crops planted, fertilized, sprayed, sprayed again and eventually harvested, tomato farmers need armies of cheap labor, Estabrook writes.  And the migrant labor system eventually descended into a nightmare of labor abuse that makes “Grapes of Wrath” sound like a picnic.

Immokalee, Florida, at the center of Estabrook’s Tomatoland, is “ground zero for modern-day slavery,” a U.S. attorney in central Florida tells the writer.  “Any American who has eaten a winter tomato, either purchased at a supermarket or on top of a fast food salad, has eaten fruit picked by the hand of a slave.”

Young Latin Americans are recruited by labor contractors, promised good wages, then sucked into a bleak cycle of work, debt, virtual captivity and horrible living conditions – while tomato growers focus on harvesting their crops.  In some cases, pickers are forced to work amid fresh pesticides, contributing to horrible birth defects and shortened lifespans.

Mercifully, Estabrook’s tour includes glimpses of optimism.  Civil rights groups have helped Latin American workers assert their rights, in some cases with help from fast food companies, whose executives were persuaded that working conditions could be improved for as little as a penny a pound of product. 

And perhaps there is hope for the long-suffering tomato as well.  Estabrook’s journey eventually takes us back to New York and Pennsylvania, where a few farmer-entrepreneurs are making a living producing quality fruit with fair labor practices.  At least some Americans will gladly pay more for a tomato with more flavor, fewer chemicals and a climate of social justice.

In addition to the elderly, susceptible people include young children, pregnant women, alcoholics, diabetics and people stricken with AIDS, HIV, various cancers, multiple sclerosis and other diseases that affect their immune systems.

These are among the findings of a paper by British researchers Barbara M. Lund of the UK Institute of Food Research, and Sarah J. O’Brien of the University of Manchester, published in the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease.

Their study, compiling findings from scores more research papers in the U.S. and Europe, reconfirms what health officials have long understood — that some people are more vulnerable than others to foodborne bugs.  In most outbreaks of Salmonella, E. coli and other illnesses, a disproportionate number of reported victims are very young or very old.

The British study seeks to quantify that increased risk, and concludes that in the U.S., UK and other developed countries, between 15 percent and 20 percent of the population are more susceptible to foodborne pathogens.

For example, a French study of listeriosis concluded that people over age 65 were 7.5 times more likely to be sickened than otherwise-healthy people under 65.  Alcoholics were 18 times more likely to be sickened, diabetics were 30 times more likely, AIDS victims were 865 times more likely, and organ transplant patients were 2,500 times more likely to be sickened.

“Vulnerability arises often because of immune suppression, through either disease processes or the medications used to manage them, and at the extremes of age or in pregnancy,” the authors report.

The vulnerability means that fewer bacteria, especially foodborne or waterborne organisms, are needed to cause disease or increase the severity of the disease, they say.

For these groups, food safety is particularly important, they report. “Outbreaks of foodborne illness in vulnerable people in hospitals and other healthcare settings are avoidable and can be prevented in several ways.”

The key strategy is a diet of food that is less likely to carry pathogens. Their list of “higher risk” foods include:

— Raw or undercooked meat or poultry

— Raw, undercooked fish, or precooked seafood such as shrimp or crab

— Unpasteurized milk, or foods containing raw eggs (i.e. homemade eggnog)

— Raw sprouts, or unwashed vegetables

— Soft cheeses made from unpasteurized milk, such as feta, brie or queso fresco

— Hot dogs and luncheon meats that have not been reheated

— Unpasteurized, refrigerated pates or meat spreads

The authors also list low-risk foods, which include cooked meats and poultry, canned seafood, pasteurized milk and eggs, cooked sprouts, washed vegetables and hard, processed cheeses.

“We have people who don’t have any work,” Cargill spokesman Mike Martin told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The Minnesota-based meat company, which employs a total of 1,200 people at the Arkansas plant, said the layoffs were necessitated by the continued shutdown of the turkey processing line. Located in the Arkansas poultry-growing region, it produces about half of Cargill’s “Honeysuckle” brand turkey products, and the company’s other turkey plant, in Virginia, can’t make up for that lost production, Martin said.

Cargill’s crisis dates to Aug. 3, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) reported that a nationwide outbreak of Salmonella Heidelberg had been traced to the Cargill plant.  Cargill Meat Solutions, the turkey subsidiary, recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey that could possibly be contaminated.

The plant was cleaned, then reopened a few days later.  But the company closed the turkey processing again on Sept. 11 and recalled another 185,000 pounds of ground turkey.

Martin said the company is waiting for clearance from the Agriculture Department to resume ground turkey production at the Springdale plant. “We are talking to the USDA virtually daily to see what it takes to re-start ground turkey production,” Martin told the Star Tribune.

The recall and closure have severely hurt turkey sales by one of the nation’s biggest turkey producers, Martin said.

The outbreak, which began in February, sickened 129 people in 34 states, from California to New England and the Deep South.   A California man died of Salmonella poisoning.

The worst-hit states were Texas and the Upper Midwest.

The onset of new illness was as recent at Sept. 13.

Now it appears that the randomness extends to the public response.  Some outbreaks of disease are quickly traced to their sources while other epidemics — probably the great majority — will take longer to be detected, if at all. 

And that response depends in large part on where the outbreak occurs. Recent studies confirm what authorities have long suspected — that there is wide variation, from state to state and from city to city, in the ability of public health officials  to detect and respond to foodborne disease.

“No matter how you look at it, you find this variability,” says Dr. Tim Jones, the Tennessee state epidemiologist and a respected authority on foodborne illness.

Last year, Jones participated in a national study conducted by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), which sent out questionnaires to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking about structure, systems, training and more. 

“The outbreaks that get the most attention are the large, multistate outbreaks, which tend to distort reality,” Jones says. “Most outbreaks of foodborne illness are small and local”

How well the health systems deal with those illnesses depends in large part on the capabilities of any of 50 state health departments and about 3,000 city and county agencies, he says.  Many have little or no experience or training with foodborne illness, and there are few legal or professional standards.

The CSTE study suggests there have been some modest improvement in state health departments since the last such survey in 2002. Specifically, the number of fulltime epidemiologists working in state health departments increased 61 percent, from 92 in 2002 to 148 last year.

But the report emphasizes that “critical gaps remain.” State health agencies reported they need a total of more than 300 more epidemiologists – a 200 percent increase.

The actual trend, of course,  is in the opposite direction. State and local health agencies lost more than 44,000 jobs between 2008 and 2010.

Meanwhile, the nationwide CSTE survey indicates that the number of foodborne illness officials trained in epidemiology drops dramatically to 48 percent at the regional level, and just 26.5 percent at the local level.

Education level is only one indicator of a health agency’s capacity to respond to outbreaks, Jones says. Others include health laws and political organization.

The Minnesota Department of Health, for example, consistently rates among the best at tracking down outbreaks of food poisoning. And experts attribute this in part to a highly centralized public health system where doctors are required to promptly report cases of food poisoning and send stool samples to a single state lab for testing.

Other states, like Texas and Florida, have decentralized health systems which tend to be slower on the pickup, Jones explains.

 And only one-fourth of states report that they use an electronic database to keep track of local outbreaks.

“It’s frustrating,” Jones says. “We have all these negative studies, but no single factor explains the variability from state to state.”

That inconsistency may be even greater within states – especially states with decentralized public health systems.

His state of Tennessee is an example. Some parts of the state respond well to outbreaks, and some don’t, he said. In many cases, this has to do with how much time passes – hours or days – between when a person gets sick and health departments are able to test for foodborne microbes.

This finding gibes with another study released Sept. 20 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC.) That study reports that state health agencies have improved their abiity to detect and respond to outbreaks of disease or chemical threats.  But many states are lagging behind the nation.

One CDC benchmark is the ability to quickly submit bacterial samples to the CDC’s PulseNet database for testing. The CDC standard is to submit 90 percent of E. coli samples within four days of receiving them.

Some states, such as Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington, were able to meet that standard with 100 percent of their samples. Others, including South Dakota, Texas, Idaho, Kansas and Florida, fell far short of that standard.

Florida was able to submit timely samples in only 71 percent of cases last year, the study says.  For Kansas, the rate was only 38 percent.

Part of the solution may be to standardize health department responses to foodborne illness, Jones says.  This might include standardized questionnaires used by epidemiologists to investigate outbreaks.

But state and local health agencies may resist greater federal intervention, he warned.  Some won’t even allow federal epidemiologists to interview sick people.

The CSTE study makes several recommendations for reducing the variability across the nation, including:

— More staff working in outbreak surveillance at the state and local levels.

— More training in epidemiology, both for existing and potential staff.

— More investment  in electronic databases and other technology.

— Improved relationships between federal, state and local health agencies.

The national Health Protection Agency (HPA) said it monitored the outbreak for six months as people continued to fall ill, but officials chose not to acknowledge the illnesses publicly because they had not identified a source.

But Friday, the agency said months of inquiry led investigators to link the outbreak to people handling raw leeks and potatoes in their home kitchens.

Authorities said the victims were sickened by a rare form of E. coli O157 known as Phage Type 8, or PT8.   Of the 250 reported case patients, 74 were hospitalized, four of them with kidney failure attributed to hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), and one died.

The outbreak is believed to have begun last December and continued into July.  Cases were scattered across the UK, with 193 in England, 44 in Scotland and 14 in Wales.  One hundred of the victims were children under age 16 and 69 percent were female.

The HPA said interviews with victims eventually led them to root vegetables prepared in homes.

“Our study showed a statistically significant association with raw loose leeks and potatoes from sacks, but these vegetables may not be the only source of contamination, HPA gastrointestinal expert Dr. Bob Adak said in a formal agency statement made public yesterday.

Compared with households without illnesses, victims were 40 times more likely to have handled leeks, and 12 times more likely to have handled potatoes, the agency said.

Most likely, it was the soil clinging to the vegetables that was contaminated with E. coli, Adak said.  “In this outbreak, which is now over, the vegetables could have carried traces of contaminated soil,” he added.

 “It is possible people caught the infection from cross-contamination in storage, inadequate washing of loose vegetables, insufficient hand washing after handling the vegetables or by failing to thoroughly clean kitchen equipment, utensils or surfaces,” he said.

Dubbed the Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation (CORE) Network, the team will be directed by Dr. Kathleen F. Gensheimer, the former Maine state epidemiologist.  As the CORE director, she will be responsible for FDA response to outbreaks, the agency announced Wednesday.

The CORE network is a multi-disciplinary team of epidemiologists, veterinarians, microbiologists and other specialists who will work full time on outbreak prevention and response, the agency said.

“The CORE Network builds on the best practices FDA has already implemented in its outbreak response efforts,” said Mike Taylor, FDA deputy commissioner of foods.  “And, in keeping with the reforms of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, CORE activities will learn from outbreaks to develop preventive systems in an effort to reduce them.

Critics have complained that federal responsibility for food safety is spread across too many agencies, including the FDA, Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control.   The CORE team will be directed to work closely with those agencies as well as state public health and agriculture departments.

“This has been in development,” FDA spokesman Douglas Karas told Food Safety News. “Basically, the goal is to build upon the best of what we currently do across FDA in incident response.”

The fulltime staff will be better equipped to respond to outbreaks, Karas said. “And we can concentrate more on lessons learned, to try and prevent incidents in the future.”

The network is not intended to replace existing programs at CDC, but rather to “help us react faster,” he said.

Gensheimer, the new director, said the network will improve communication among federal, state and local agencies.  “Given my background at the state level, this is a major priority for me,” she said.

Cargill announced the recall of 185,000 pounds of turkey that was processed at the Arkansas plant on Aug 23, 24, 30 and 31, 2011, after a random sample collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service Aug. 24 tested positive for the same Salmonella Heidelberg strain that sickened more than 100 people in 31 states earlier this summer. Twenty-seven people were hospitalized and one person died.

The Springdale plant was closed again Friday, and the recall announced at about 2 a.m. (PDT) Sunday as the nation prepared to observe the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we are acting quickly in response to USDA’s sample testing,” said Steve Willardsen, president of Cargill’s turkey business, in a prepared statement. “Although there are no known illnesses associated with this positive sample, it is the same Salmonella Heidelberg strain that resulted in our voluntary recall on Aug. 3.”

Food safety attorney Bill Marler, publisher of Food Safety News, said it is significant that Cargill is recalling Salmonella-tainted ground turkey without evidence of human illness. “In essence, Cargill is treating Salmonella like it is in fact an adulterant. For that Cargill should be commended.”

Sunday’s recall is small compared to the August 3 recall of 36 million pounds of fresh and frozen ground turkey produced over a period of more than five months.

Following that recall, the Springdale plant was cleaned and the company installed an “enhanced food safety plan” designed to be “the most aggressive and advanced program in the poultry industry,” Cargill spokesman Mike Martin said at the time. The plant was reopened two weeks later, on Aug 18, having increased the level of antibacterial treatment in its turkey processing line.

“The measures that we put in place were showing encouraging results,” Martin told Food Safety News on Sunday. “We were seeing lower numbers of Salmonella positives since those new measures were implemented.”

However, some authorities had remained skeptical. Oregon epidemiologist Bill Keene was sufficiently concerned that he bought 15 packages of Cargill ground turkey in the Portland area and had them tested.  Six of the 15 packages tested positive for Salmonella.

Last week’s FSIS test appears to confirm Keene’s suspicions that contaminated ground turkey remained on the market.

“As we all know, Salmonella is a naturally occurring bacteria which is ubiquitous in the environment,” Martin said.  “It’s indicative of the challenges the food processing industry faces trying to get its arms around this problem.”

After two consecutive recalls, the Springdale plant might be considered suspect. But that plant is located in the heart of Arkansas poultry country, and it has been producing ground turkey for more than 20 years, Martin said. “And, prior to August 3, it had never had a recall.”

One alternative for safer ground poultry and other meats is irradiation, which effectively kills bacteria without affecting the meat, Martin said. But the industry fears that consumers won’t accept irradiated food, which must be labeled as such.

Meanwhile, the latest recall “strengthens our resolve,” to ensure that its ground meat is not contaminated, Martin said.

The recalled products are: 

Fresh Ground Turkey Chubs (chubs are cylinders, or rolls, of ground turkey):

— 16 oz. (1 lb.) chubs of Fresh HEB Ground Turkey 85/15 with Use or Freeze by Dates of 09/12/2011, 09/13/2011, 09/19/2011 and 09/20/2011

— 16 oz. (1 lb.) chubs of Honeysuckle White 85/15 Fresh Ground Turkey with Use or Freeze by Dates of 09/19/2011, 09/20/2011 and 09/21/2011

Fresh Ground Turkey Trays:

— 19.2 oz. (1.2 lb.) trays of Honeysuckle White 85/15 Ground Turkey with Use or Freeze by Dates of 09/10/2011 and 09/12/2011

— 48.0 oz. (3 lb.) trays of Kroger Ground Turkey Fresh 85/15 with Use or Freeze by Dates of 09/17/2011, 09/18/2011 and 09/19/2011

— 48.0 oz. (3 lbs.) trays of Honeysuckle White 85/15 Ground Turkey Family Pack with Use or Freeze by Dates of 09/11/2011, 09/12/2011, 09/13/2011, 09/15/2011, 09/17/2011 and 09/18/2011

— 16 oz. (1 lb.) trays of Honeysuckle White 85/15 Ground Turkey with a Use or Freeze by Date of 09/11/2011

Fresh Ground Turkey Patties:

— 16.0 oz. (1 lb.) trays of Honeysuckle White Ground Turkey Patties with a Use or Freeze by Date of 09/18/2011

— 16 oz. (1 lb.) trays of Kroger Ground Seasoned Turkey Patties Fresh 85/15 with a Use or Freeze by Date of 09/17/2011

When available, the retail distribution list will be posted on the FSIS website. Consumers who purchased the recalled ground turkey may return them to the retailer. Questions may be addressed by phoning Cargill’s consumer relations toll-free telephone number: 1-888-812-1646.

The company urged consumers to take normal precautions when preparing and cooking ground turkey and other meats. That includes cooking ground poultry to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, as measured by a tip-sensitive food thermometer, and washing with warm, soapy water hands, cutting boards, dishes, utensils or anything else that has come in contact with raw poultry. Keep raw poultry away from foods that won’t be cooked. 

“We all need to remember bacteria is everywhere, and we must properly handle and prepare fresh foods,” Willardsen said in his prepared statement. “USDA food safety guidelines can be found on the USDA website.”

The earlier Cargill recall included fresh and frozen ground turkey produced between February 20 and August 2.  It followed the determination by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that more than 100 people had been sickened and one had died from Salmonella poisoning attributed to Cargill’s ground turkey.

The CDC estimates that for every illness reported in such outbreaks, more than 30 cases go unreported, meaning that more than 2,000 people may have been sickened over the five months that the Cargill meat was being sold.

Passionate advocates from both ends of the political spectrum object to state and federal laws regulating the sale of unpasteurized milk. They believe pasteurization deprives cows’ milk of important nutrients that bolster the human immune system and ward off illness.  And they say government has no business telling citizens they can’t sell it or buy it.

Whatever their politics, these raw milk devotees are at odds with the overwhelming weight of scientific and medical authorities, who declare unpasteurized milk is no healthier than processed, and the lack of pasteurization greatly increases the risks of being sickened by E. coli, Campylobacter or other harmful microbes.

This, of course, is only one issue on which significant numbers of Americans are in conflict with science.  While most scientists are convinced that burning oil and coal causes global warming, many conservatives insist that, if climate change is occurring at all, it is part of a natural cycle. Science says homosexuality is largely an inherited trait; critics say it’s a choice. Most scientific research indicates that genetically modified foods are safe for consumption and for the environment, but millions of Americans believe otherwise.

And, of course, nearly 50 percent of Americans, and especially conservative Christians, dismiss evolution theory, a fundamental concept accepted by virtually every scientist on earth.

And so forth.  Americans seem to be fiercely resistant to scientific authority – at least in certain areas that affect their lives.

For this, liberals blame conservative Republicans, who are far more likely than liberals to question climate change or Darwinist evolution. Science writer Chris Mooney has written three books on the subject, including “The Republican War on Science.” As partisanship has deepened in America, Mooney argues, conservatives have increasingly challenged scientific ideas. “Science denial today is considerably more prominent on the political right,” he writes, especially on  “climate and related environmental issues, anti-evolutionism, attacks on reproductive health science by the Christian right and biomedical issues.”

There are a number of reasons for this. The Republican alliance with fundamentalist Christians has lured support in the South and the heartland, but this has required the party to take nonscientific stances on evolution and other divisive issues.

But if Republicans feel no affection for the scientists, then the feeling appears to be mutual.  A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center found that only six percent of U.S. scientists identify themselves as Republicans, compared with 55 percent who see themselves as Democrats and 39 percent who say they are independent. Similarly, 9 percent of scientists said they were “conservative,” while two thirds said they were “liberal” or “very liberal.”

That partisanship, in turn, could be attributed to the fact that most scientists work for government, where Republicans are forever trying to cut their budgets. Perhaps scientists are merely expressing their self interest.

Conservatives, however, hold no monopoly on hostility toward science.  Liberal Democrats who subscribe to the scientific views of evolution and climate change are liable to part ways on such issues as genetically modified foods and the alleged link between childhood vaccines and autism.  Liberal voices ranging from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the Huffington Post have challenged the science establishment on the autism theory.

“The assertion that childhood vaccines are driving autism rates has been undermined by multiple epidemiological studies,” writes Mooney.

Some of this skepticism toward science may be built into our national character.  Some 175 years ago, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville argued that those odd Americans had no use for scientific theory. “They mistrust systems,” he explained. “Scientific precedents have little weight with them… Hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge.”

This is especially true when people are confronted with practical decisions such as raw milk, says Dr. John Kobayashi, a University of Washington professor and widely respected authority on foodborne illness.  “While a mistrust of science exists, much of the problem is the difficulty in making rational risk-benefit decisions,” he says.

There’s simply too much information out there, bouncing around the Internet, readily available, making it difficult for people to do the homework necessary to make thoughtful decisions.

And with all that information, one can always Google up a scientific source that reinforces what we already believe.

Take evolution, for example.  While the vast majority of scientists support Darwin’s theory, there are a few seemingly credible voices who don’t.  And that small minority of voices is enough to provide political and intellectual cover for evolution critics such as Seattle’s Discovery Institute.

These conflicts are nothing new, says Dan Kahan, a Yale Law professor who has studied American attitudes toward risk and science. “There’s so many voices – Fox News and CNN and ABC and MSNBC… Twitter and Facebook. And fifteen books on either side of any issue.  Is anybody actually reading those books?  Who’s actually paying attention?”

In fact, Kahan says, most Americans agree on most scientific issues. The areas of disagreement, whether it is evolution or climate change or raw milk, are actually the exceptions to the rule, he says.

And on those issues, people are merely seeking out information that supports what they already believe, he adds.  It’s fundamental human nature.

“People may look like they are ignoring the evidence. But you inquire more closely, and you find out they actually believe their positions are consistent with science.”

So you have pro-evolution people and anti-evolution people, pro raw milk and anti raw milk people, all scouring the information universe, looking for science to support their opinions … and finding it.

Public health authorities and consumer activists described the complaint filed by Del Monte Fresh Produce as an attempt to intimidate food safety programs across the country.

But experts close to the food industry described it as one large corporation declaring: “Enough is enough.” 

Either way, the lawsuit is a response to a finding by the FDA earlier this year that a Salmonella Panama outbreak that had sickened 20 people in 10 states was likely caused by contaminated cantaloupes grown in Guatemala and imported by Del Monte Fresh Produce.

At the time, the Florida-based company voluntarily recalled nearly 5,000 cartons of cantaloupes, and since then the FDA has banned further cantaloupe imports from the company’s site in Asuncion Mita, Guatemala.

However, public health authorities never established a positive match — a genetic “fingerprint” — linking Del Monte’s cantaloupes to the Salmonella infections. Instead, the investigation was based on established epidemiological procedures — interviews with the victims and a process of elimination that concluded there was a high probability that cantaloupes were the culprit. Traceback information from Costco indicated the suspect brand was Del Monte Fresh Produce. 

The company’s 25-page complaint, filed in Maryland, questions the findings of that investigation and seeks to lift the FDA’s restrictions on cantaloupe imports from Guatemala. And it challenges the federal import alert, which empowers FDA to detain goods without physical examination, and requires the company to show its melons are safe.

The company also served notice it will sue Oregon Public Health, and senior epidemiologist Dr. William Keene, who was one of several investigators from different states who worked on the case last March.

Del Monte Fresh Produce’s complaint says the FDA forced it to recall its cantaloupes or “suffer the consequences of an FDA consumer advisory questioning the wholesomeness” of its product. The subsequent ban on imports is unlawful, the company claims, because it is not supported by the facts.

The company now claims its cantaloupes were wrongly blamed for the outbreak.

One lawyer who represents U.S. companies in food poisoning cases said companies like Del Monte are frequently frustrated with being forced into costly recalls despite a lack of what they consider to be conclusive evidence.

Companies are notified by the FDA with little or no warning, explained the lawyer, who asked not to be quoted by name. “”You get a day or two heads-up that it appears to be your product, and there is not much opportunity to have a conversation … There is not enough collaboration, and it comes across as not even-handed.”

Keene, in particular, has antagonized companies with his outspoken style, the lawyer said.

However, food safety advocates pointed out that the public health system is primarily responsible for protecting consumers, not companies.

“Del Monte appears to be asking for the almost impossible before the FDA can issue an alert,” warned Caroline Smith DeWaal, a lawyer and food safety specialist at the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. “The company wants the FDA to require a smoking gun, a positive genetic test, before taking action.  That is unrealistic and it puts a burden on investigators that is unmanageable.”

Dr. Tim Jones, the Tennessee state epidemiologist, does not expect the case to go far.  “But just the threat could have a chilling effect on public health agencies.”

Health departments should not be immune from lawsuits, Jones said. But Keene is an example of a public servant who is also a disciplined scientist.  “He is outspoken, but his comments are always justified,” Jones said. “It’s not a matter of cockiness. His job is to protect the public and that is what he tries to do. He is one of a small group of people willing to be blunt and honest with the industry, and I trust what he says.”

He and others stressed that Keene and others employ investigative tactics that are statistically sound and fully tested after many years of epidemiology.

When they can, authorities use genetic fingerprinting, the popular term for pulsed field gel electrophoresis, or PFGE, to establish a virtually certain link between an outbreak of illness and a specific food. But PFGE is limited because investigations usually occur weeks after the outbreak, and perishable food is likely to have been either consumed or discarded, making it impossible to test for contamination.

Keene explained the problem earlier this year in an interview with Food Safety News. “It would be great if we could just buy the product, take it to the lab and find Salmonella,” he said at the time.  “That’s something anybody can understand.  But when you offer up P values and probabilities, people want to say: ‘That’s just  statistical mumbo jumbo.’ “

In fact, epidemiologists have been tracking outbreaks for decades by interviewing victims, looking for foods that all or most of them have consumed, and employing basic statistics to zero in on a probable source.

Statistically, those findings can be just as powerful and persuasive as the lab results, according to food safety experts.

Their credibility was damaged, however, by the 2008 Salmonella outbreak that was originally blamed on tomatoes in a Mexican salsa, but later turned out to be peppers used in the same salsa. That error cost the tomato industry millions of dollars, and soured relations between the food industry and health agencies.

“I still don’t think the wrong thing was done there,” said Jones of the tomato misidentification. “There were nuances over how information was communicated.  But no one was being malicious or irresponsible. We would not be able to live with ourselves if a child died from food poisoning in the three days that we dilly-dallied around looking for that last piece of  conclusive evidence.”

Americans contradict themselves, he said, in that they “want their food to be 100 percent safe and they get angry when it isn’t…. and they also want 100 percent conclusive evidence before issuing a recall.”

(Marler Clark, the food safety law firm that sponsors this site, has filed suit against Del Monte Fresh Produce on behalf of several people sickened in last spring’s Salmonella outbreak.)

Ben Hewitt, attempts to provide that voice with his new book, “Making Supper Safe” (Rodale Books, $25) in which he uses raw milk as a case study to explore the broader issues of foodborne illness.

Hewitt undertakes his journey as journalism, consulting with scientists and dairy farmers, foodies and lawyers, including Bill Marler, the food poisoning lawyer who also publishes this site.  But it becomes evident that Hewitt is struggling, that his journalistic instincts are in conflict with a deeper, earthier identity.  Hewitt is also a farmer who, with his wife, operates a small farm in Vermont.

And thereby hangs this tale, because  Hewitt eventually confesses (in parentheses, no less) that, even as he weighs the issue,  he and his family drink raw milk.   And, by hanging out with the likes of Marler, who has sued raw milk dairies over outbreaks of food poisoning, Hewitt consorts with the devil.

At the time of his interview, Marler was engaged in a blogging duel with raw milk advocates, each side spewing “reams of colorful commentary” over  whether and how government should regulate the sale of unpasteurized milk.  Marler plays the part of the regulator.

“What Marler seemed to be saying is that the root cause of foodborne illness isn’t pathogenic bacteria; it is immorality,” Hewitt writes. “Cutting corners in pursuit of profit… viewing someone’s kidney failure as a line item in a cost-benefit analysis.”

Later he visits with James Stewart, the California entrepreneur who some years ago founded Rawsome, which markets unpasteurized milk and other raw food in Southern California.   Stewart, in turn, leads Hewitt into the strange story of Aajonus Vonderplanitz, the sort of John the Baptist of raw foods.

Vonderplanitz claimed that a diet of carrot juice and other faw foods cured him of dyslexia, cancer and saved his life while providing the basis for his nutritional counseling practice which he claimed cured scores more of their cancers.  Hewitt decides this is “the most unusual human health history I’ve ever encountered.”

And so it goes.  Hewitt hangs out with a friend who feeds himself by Dumpster diving.  He visits researchers trying to unravel the mysteries of E. Coli o157:H7 and other toxic bugs.  Through all this, he resists any overt partisanship, clings to his journalistic objectivity.

But yet his rural New England sensibilities tug quietly at his soul, preventing him from taking up Marler’s argument.  He is clearly offended by accounts of the Los Angeles raid on Rawsome Foods in 2010, during which police seized quantities of unpasteurized milk, cheese and other products.

Hewitt insists he does not blindly accept the sweeping health claims made by Stewart and other raw milk devotees.   Nor does he reject them.

“But there is one part of this story that I believe we should all take very seriously: The right to eat how we choose, and the right to procure and produce these foods without fear of being raided by pistol-wielding officers.”

Who can disagree with that?

But Hewitt has one more stop to make before finishing his manuscript.   He drives down to Connecticut and visits with Chris and Holly Standish, whose daughter Margot was horribly sickened with E. coli in raw milk from a local dairy.  That visit forces the author to acknowledge “that the victims of foodborne illness are real and good people, not so different from me and you.”

“This is an absurdly obvious truth, but still it had managed to elude me… Before I met Margot, the whole notion that one could be made acutely ill from eating contaminated food had seemed somewhat vague and theoretical.”

This is all it took to rattle Hewitt’s libertarian impulses, and to perhaps reconsider Marler’s morality argument.

Dealing with foodborne illness is not about eliminating risk, nor ignoring it. The challenge for legislators and governors and food processors is to regulate our food supply in such a way that Americans can eat what they choose while minimizing the risk that we will poison our children.

The plant was reopened after extensive cleaning of its processing line and federal approval of an “enhanced food safety plan” that is “the most aggressive and advanced program in the poultry industry,” said Cargill spokesman Mike Martin.

However,  a sampling of Cargill turkey products tested by Oregon public health officials showed that 10 to 15 percent of the tested meats were contaminated – at least some of it with the same genetic strain identified in the nationwide outbreak of Salmonellla Heidelberg.

One of the world’s largest food companies, with $120 billion in sales last year, Cargill suspended operations at the Arkansas plant early this month and recalled 36 million pounds of fresh and frozen ground turkey products processed at the plant between February 20 and Aug 2.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced yesterday that 111 people from 31 states have now been sickened, and one has died, from food poisoning traced to the contaminated turkey product.

The CDC estimates that for every illness reported in such outbreaks, more than 30 go unreported, meaning that more than 2,000 people may have been sickened by Cargill’s ground turkey over five months.

Cargill spokesman Martin said the company upgraded several elements of its food safety program at the plant, including a new critical control point (or CCP) in the bird chilling system.  They also increased the level of antibacterial treatment by 25 percent and added two antibacterial treatments to the harvest line.

“While the ground turkey room was not in operation, we disassembled and steam cleaned equipment,” Martin added.  “We are also requiring our Springdale suppliers to have a CCP similar to Cargill’s food safety plan.”

The company also modified its sampling and testing program to allow for continuous testing against company standards.

Meanwhile, Oregon health officials bought samples of Cargill ground turkey products and sent them to a Seattle lab for testing.  State epidemiologist Katrina Hedberg reported that “a  number of samples came back positive – about 10 to 15 percent.”

However, that may not be unusual, Hedberg explained, because turkey and other poultry is highly susceptible to Salmonella contamination.

Most consumers are aware of that risk, and understand that adequate cooking kills those microbes, she said.  “We know that a certain percentage tested positive, but we also have to pay attention to the degree of contamination.”

“These are policy questions,” Hedberg said. “We had a sample of Italian sausage that tested positive for the outbreak strain.  But what does that mean?   These are policy decisions.”

Cargill has concluded there was a problem in the Arkansas plant, and they believe they have resolved it.

As for consumers, Hedberg said her advice is, as usual: If you’re going to eat ground turkey or any other ground meat, “Cook it.”

While cooking, take precautions to prevent raw ground turkey from contaminating cutting boards, counter tops or other cooked or uncooked food. And always wash hands after handling raw poultry.

The Washington Department of Health this week closed Sequim Bay, near the entrance to Puget Sound, to shellfish harvests after three people fell ill with Diarrhetic Shellfish Poisoning (DSP.) 

The same biotoxin had appeared earlier this month in mussels from two shellfish farms in British Columbia, sickening about 50 people. Canadian authorities warned consumers not to eat mussels sold by Island Sea Farms Inc. in late July.

DSP is an intestinal illness caused by a naturally occurring biotoxin that can be carried by certain marine dinoflagellates. Dinoflagellates are microscopic marine organisms that are an important part of the food supply for shellfish around the world.

Dinoflagellates also carry the far more dangerous Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP), which includes a highly toxic neurotoxin for which there is no cure. DSP, however, causes diarrhea and other symptoms that are not life-threatening and rarely require hospitalization.

DSP outbreaks had been reported in the Netherlands in the 1960s, followed by outbreaks in Japan, France, Scandanavia and South America.  Like other shellfish-related illnesses, DSP outbreaks occur in the summer months, when tidal shellfish beds are exposed to warming air temperatures.

But Northwest waters had been spared – until the last few weeks.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency issued warnings for mussels sold across much of Canada with several brand names, including Saltspring Island, Albion Fisheries and Pacific Rim Shellfish and B&C Food. To date, the outbreak has been limited to shellfish from the two Island Sea Farms operations.

Washington’s outbreak affects a rural bay just outside Puget Sound. Health officials recalled all shellfish sold from the bay since August 1.  And officials believe that all of the recalled product has been removed from the market.

“This is not one bad batch of turkey,” warns Dr. Bill Keene, a nationally known foodborne illness specialist and senior epidemiologist at the Oregon Public Health Division. “That’s not the pattern of this outbreak. It’s been going on for months and months, which suggests an ongoing problem.”

Keene was sufficiently concerned that he bought 15 packages of ground turkey products in the Portland area and sent them to a lab for testing.  The results came back Wednesday: Six of the 15 packages tested positive for Salmonella.

Testing had not yet identified the specific type of Salmonella, so Keene could not say with certainty that his samples were linked to the national outbreak.

Contamination is usually spotty, Keene explains. “You won’t find it in 100 percent of packages, but in this case, we’re finding it in a distressingly high proportion of them.”

Last week, the huge Cargill Corporation recalled 36 million pounds of fresh and frozen ground turkey products processed at the company’s plant in Springdale, Arkansas.  The recall covered specific ground turkey produced between February 20 and August 2 this year. Cargill also suspended production at the Arkansas plant until the problem has been solved.

This followed a determination by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal authorities that at least 78 people spread across 26 states have been sickened, and one person died, from food poisoning traced to Cargill’s ground turkey.

The CDC estimates that for every illness reported in such outbreaks, more than 30 go unreported, meaning that more than 2,000 people may have been sickened over five months.

Health authorities point out that turkey and other commercial poultry are susceptible to Salmonella contamination. How this happens is not complicated, Keene says.  Turkeys are killed, then dumped into an ice bath to chill the carcasses and reduce bacterial growth.

“The problem is the bath is heavily contaminated, so there is lots of potential for cross contamination.”

Grinding  the meat increases the risk, he adds.  “If, for example, a bird has a one-in-ten chance of being contaminated, then you grind 10 of them together and you have a probability…. Mix a hundred of them and it’s virtually certain to be contaminated.”

This may be preventable, but apparently it would add to the processing costs in a highly competitive market.

“That’s why I was concerned when I learned that Cargill didn’t recall everything from that plant,” he adds. “I wanted to know why.  Did somebody make a mistake?  Or did somebody make a quick decision that this product had to be recalled but those ones didn’t?  And how did they reach that decision so quickly?”

The  nature of the outbreak, spread over more than five months, suggests that Cargill’s problem is more than one batch of contaminated turkeys, Keene says.  “It may be a machinery problem that is not being picked up by their routine sanitizing procedures.”

To date, Oregon has only one lab-confirmed case of Salmonella poisoning attributed to Cargill’s ground turkey. But Keene wanted to know: Is the outbreak over?

That’s why he bought up the 15 packages of various Cargill ground turkey products and sent them to a Seattle lab. Further testing will determine if the bacteria in the six that tested positive for Salmonella matches the outbreak strain.

Other states are equally curious, he said.  One epidemiologist in another state proposed to do similar testing, but was told there was not enough money in the budget.

The longer the heat spell, the higher the risk that bacteria called Vibrio or other such microbes will multiply among their millions of prized oysters, says Bill Dewey of Taylor Shellfish, the nation’s largest shellfish company. 

So it was that last week, when Pacific Northwest temperatures finally edged into the 70s and stayed there for a while, oyster-lovers and oyster growers paid the price. By week’s end 18 illnesses had been linked to commercial shellfish operations, and four more to recreational harvesting in Puget Sound and the Washington coast in an outbreak of Vibrio parahaemolyticus.

State health officials warned shellfish lovers to ice or refrigerate oysters, rinse them and cook them thoroughly -145 degrees for 15 seconds – to destroy the vibrio bacteria.

Dewey knew this was coming, because it happens virtually every summer.  But there is nothing they can do about it because, to date, growers have not found a way to monitor for vibrio.  All he and other growers can do is wait for somebody to get sick  — bad news for the seafood lovers who crave their raw oysters, and for entrepreneurs who grow and sell them.

Standing on the mudflats, surrounded by hundreds of acres of shellfish beds, Dewey looks every bit the farmer he is — faded jeans, a work shirt and heavy hip-wader boots sunk a couple of inches in tidal muck.

As he discusses the problem, midday heat creates a steamy mist across the dark tideflats, reminding him of the microbial rogue’s gallery lurking in his crop. Those rogue microbes generally fall into one of three biological groups that are all naturally occurring and frequently confused with each other, Dewey says.

First there is Paralytic Shellfish Poison, sometimes known misleadingly as “red tide,” which is perhaps the best-known and certainly the most frightening.  PSP is not a bacterium itself, but rather a biotoxin that is produced by certain species of microscopic  algae. 

That toxin can be carried by all shellfish with hinged shells – from oysters and scallops to clams and mussels. It can be  carried by crab as well, but does not infect the meat, so is not considered dangerous.

PSP is highly toxic, and frequently fatal.  The toxin is tasteless, and does not cook out of the shellfish.  And there is no known antidote.

Richard Lillie, a shellfish specialist at the Washington Department of Health, warns that consumers are easily confused by the term, “red tide.”  In Atlantic waters, the water may turn red with the biotoxin, but not in the Pacific, he says.

However, PSP is also fairly rare, thanks in large part to scientists who have been studying the stuff and come up with ways to identify harmful blooms before they make people sick.  In Washington’s case, this consists of caged shellfish in strategic spots around Puget Sound and other coastal waters.  Those cages are checked frequently, and if any of those sites tests positive for PSP, the area is immediately closed to harvest.

For most shellfish growers, the more common problem is Vibrio, a family of bacteria that bear a cosmetic similarity to distant cousins such as Salmonella. And, while it may not be as deadly as PSP, Vibrio poses another problem – it is extremely difficult to detect.

Around the Gulf of Mexico, which still dominates the oyster markets, the major concern is Vibrio vulnificus. Every year, Dewey says, it sickens and kills people – but only people with compromised immune systems, generally due to illnesses.  “The same number of people die each year from Vibrio after swimming in the gulf – people who are immuno compromised,” he explains.

But Taylor and other Pacific Northwest shellfish growers don’t have to worry about that one, Dewey adds. It is rare in Northwest waters.

Instead, they worry about Vibrio parahaemolyticus, a close cousin which gets along just fine in the Pacific – as demonstrated by last week’s outbreak in Washington.  This microbe probably won’t kill you, Dewey says.  But it causes a gutache and severe diarrhea that may make you wish you were dead.

“I’ve had it,” Dewey says.  “And I won’t forget it.”

Most frustrating, shellfish growers have no effective means of monitoring for Vibrio.  Basically, all they can do is wait until somebody gets sick, and the illness is linked to consumption of shellfish.

“We don’t know what to monitor for, other than for actual illnesses,” Dewey explains.

Clams and mussels are not a problem, because the bacteria is killed in the cooking process.  But what about all those aficionados of raw oysters?

Health officials have proposed various processing strategies to kill  bacteria – mechanized processing, pasteurization, and irradiation.  But each of those processes kills the oyster, Dewey says. And oyster lovers aren’t going to like that idea.

So, for shellfish growers in the Pacific Northwest, the best bet seems to be cold weather.   As air and water temperatures rise, Vibrio populations tend to take off.  And, while the rest of the nation has been sweltering, the Northwest seems stuck in a perpetual spring – 70 degree days and frequent overcast.

That’s bad news for Vibrio, but great news for oyster growers and oyster lovers.

Bexar County District Court Judge Barbara Nellermoe ordered Sangar Fresh Cut Produce to pay medical costs and damages to the widow and children of Hermillo Castellano, 81, who died June 15 last year in a San Antonio hospital after a 13-day struggle with Listeria monocytogenes.

Castellano was one of at least 10 Texas residents who were poisoned last year by eating chopped celery packaged by Sangar. Five of them died.

He was already hospitalized with a previous condition when he consumed the celery.  He was discharged, but three days later began experiencing severe gastrointestinal problems and was readmitted to the hospital. There he tested positive for Listeria monocytogenes, which proved to be a fatal infection.

The victim’s widow, Elizabeth Castellano, filed suit. But Sangar failed to respond to the Castellano complaint, leading to this week’s default judgement by the Texas court. The judgement included $145,485 for medical expenses, $500,000 for pain and mental anguish, and $500,000 for loss of companionship.

The company did not show up in court to resist the claim. “They closed down and never reopened,” said attorney David Babcock with the Seattle foods-safety law firm Marler Clark (which publishes this site). “Corporations are funny things, and they sort of evaporated.”

Texas authorities traced the Listeria outbreak to the Sangar plant, where state and federal inspectors found contamination in multiple locations, including areas where food was processed.  Officials said DNA analysis of the outbreak strain matched samples found throughout the plant.

Sangar was ordered to stop processing food last October 20, and to recall all the products it had shipped from the San Antonio plant since the previous January.

Sangar’s chopped celery was sold primarily to restaurants, schools, hospitals, nursing homes and similar institutions.

Sangar, however, protested the order, claiming the company’s private lab tests had been negative for Listeria. The company alleged that their product samples may have been  contaminated by authorities while being collected and transported.

But federal investigators revealed a host of sanitation problems at the Texas plant, from poor employee training, inadequate cleaning, inadequate handwashing, poor plumbing and much more.

A state health official reports that the plant is now operated by a different company that has cleaned it up and is following sanitary procedures.

A task force of health officials set up by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reported that “one lot of fenugreek seeds imported from Egypt is the most likely common link between the two outbreaks.”

And it is likely that contaminated seeds remain on the European market, leading the EU to reiterate its warning and ban the import of Egyptian seeds until October 31.

While the seeds that triggered epidemics in northern Germany and in Bordeaux, France, travelled different routes, both lots originated in Egypt, investigators concluded.

Both were traced back a year and a half to a shipment of 33,000 pounds (15,000 kg) of fenugreek seeds, Lot No. 48088, that was loaded onto a ship at the Egyptian port of Damietta on Nov. 24, 2009.  That ship steamed to Antwerp, Belgium, and the seeds were barged to Rotterdam to clear customs.

The sealed container was trucked into Germany to an unidentified importer, who resold most of the lot. An unidentified German company then resold about 150 pounds of the seeds to the German sprouter, Gartnerhof Bienenbuttel, which is believed to be the source of the sprouts that caused the enormous outbreak of E. coli poisoning in northern Germany.

Meanwhile, the German importer also sold about 800 pounds of sprout seed to the English company Thompson & Morgan, which repackaged the seeds into 1.75-ounce (50 grams) packages. Those packages were shipped to a French distributor, who resold the seeds to about 200 garden centers around France.

Investigators believe that one of those packets was the source of the second European outbreak, which has sickened 16 people in the Bordeaux area.

Because more contaminated seeds could be in circulation, “it seems appropriate to consider all lots of fenugreek from the (Egyptian) exporter as suspect,” the EFSA report concluded. Trace-forward findings indicate the German importer sold seeds from the suspected lot to 70 companies.

Even a negative laboratory test of those seeds “cannot be interpreted  as proof that a batch is not contaminated,” the report says.  EFSA also said the seeds were likely contaminated with E. coli O104:H4 at some point before leaving the importer.  A “production or distribution process” might have allowed contamination by human or animal fecal material.

Europeans have been alarmed by watching thousands of people sickened by a few miniscule sprout seeds.  But U.S. experts have seen this before.

“Sprouts are susceptible as a raw vegetable product, ” says Ben Miller of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.  “The seed is likely to come into contact with soil, which is a great place to become contaminated with salmonella or E. coli.   And the seed itself provides an ideal space for the pathogen to settle in for long periods of time.”

The shelf life of the seed can be up to five years, Miller said.  And the bacteria will remain.

Under the right, or wrong, circumstances, a single bacterium on a single seed can end up contaminating an entire batch of sprouts, he said.

Most sprouters are small, local, independent farms that probably do not produce their own seed, Miller said.  The seed is cheap and easy to ship, so the sprouter is likely to have it shipped.

Europe’s twin outbreaks, caused by seeds that were shipped from Egypt 18 months earlier, appear to be a classic example of that.

“Sprouts are a great vehicle for all kinds of pathogens,” Miller said. “But we have lots of questions.  Will there be an environmental investigation in Egypt?  Where were these sprouts growing?  Why were they so susceptible to this pathogen?  Did it originate with cows? With human waste?”

Saddled with a $5 billion budget deficit and a legislative stalemate, the state temporarily laid off most state workers at midnight Thursday, forcing a shutdown of popular services ranging from childcare and licensing  to the zoo and state parks. 

But food safety advocates around the nation watched closely for what would happen to the team of epidemiologists widely considered the best in the nation at detecting and investigating outbreaks of E. coli, Salmonella and other food poisoning.

Working from offices next to the state capitol in St. Paul, Minnesota’s epidemiologists have been credited with detecting and tracing countless regional and national outbreaks — including the 2009 Salmonella outbreak eventually blamed on peanut paste.

Health authorities widely credit state laws that require prompt reporting of foodborne illness to the state office, and a team of university students known as “Team Diarrhea” who conduct telephone interviews with victims, helping investigators zero in on sources.

But all that was put on hold Friday, after budget negotiations broke down in the state legislature.

“We have about 189 of our 1,550 employees working on a limited number of critical services,” said department spokesman John Steiger. “Team D, per se, is not operating.”

Foodborne illness director Kirk Smith and two other department employees were maintaining a skeletal operation. “And there is a process in place whereby we can request additional staffing if we need to respond to a significant outbreak,”  Steiger said.

Ben Miller, who works for the adjacent state Department of Agriculture, pointed out  that he could help out in the event of an outbreak.  Agriculture is the only state department whose budget passed the state Legislature, so it is fully staffed.

“Ten years ago, when I was a student, I worked on Team D, and I’ve already volunteered to dust off my interviewing skills,” Miller said.  “There are a few of us here with that experience. So, if we’re needed, we’ll roll up our sleeves and pitch in.”