This is what happens when things break down
There’s
a Major Foodborne Illness Outbreak and the Government’s Shut Down
7
October, 2013
Late-breaking
news, and I’ll update as I find out more: While the government is
shut down, with food-safety personnel and disease detectives sent
home and forbidden to work, a major foodborne-illness outbreak has
begun. This evening, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the US
Department of Agriculture announced that “an estimated 278
illnesses … reported in 18 states” have been caused by chicken
contaminated with Salmonella
Heidelberg and possibly produced by the firm Foster Farms.
“FSIS
is unable to link the illnesses to a specific product and a specific
production period,” the agency said in an emailed alert. “The
outbreak is continuing.”
(Updates
to this post are at the bottom.)
This
is the exact situation that CDC and other about-to-be-furloughed
federal personnel warned about last week. As a reminder, a CDC
staffer told
me at the time:
I know that we will not be conducting multi-state outbreak investigations. States may continue to find outbreaks, but we won’t be doing the cross-state consultation and laboratory work to link outbreaks that might cross state borders.
That
means that the lab work and molecular detection that can link
far-apart cases and define the size and seriousness of outbreaks are
not happening. At the CDC, which operates the national
foodborne-detection services FoodNet and PulseNet, scientists
couldn’t work on this if they wanted to; they have been locked out
of their offices, lab and emails. (At a conference I attended last
week, 10 percent of the speakers did not show up because they were
CDC personnel and risked being fired if they traveled even
voluntarily.)
In
case it seems like this is not a big deal (just 300 illnesses, just
some raw chicken): foodborne illness can have lifelong
consequences that
range from arthritis to kidney trouble to heart disease. And: The
number of illnesses that can be identified in any foodborne outbreak
are almost
always an under-estimate.
Raw products from the facilities in question bear one of the establishment numbers inside a USDA mark of inspection or elsewhere on the package:
“P6137”
“P6137A”
“P7632”
The products were mainly distributed to retail outlets in California, Oregon and Washington State.
It
is the second time this year that the firm at the center of this
alert, Foster Farms, has been linked to a nationwide Salmonella
outbreak. In July,
according to the CDC, 134 people in 13 states were
made ill by chicken linked to two Foster Farms slaughterhouses.
More
to come on this, I am sure.
Updates,
Oct. 8:
Taylor
Dobbs,
an excellent reporter at Vermont
Public Radio,
has identified the 18 states where cases have been found: Arizona,
Arkansas, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii,
Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas,
Utah, Washington, Wisconsin. Big thanks to him for sharing his
results.
There
were many other overnight and early-morning stories on this; I
liked JoNel
Aleccia‘s
at NBC News.
Foster
Farms, the company named yesterday by the USDA, has issued a press
release.
An interesting point, which I hope to follow up on: They refer in the
first paragraph to the previous outbreak this summer as having
affected their “Pacific Northwest operations earlier this year.”
The alert yesterday referred to California operations. If that is not
a miscommunication and there are in fact different plants involved,
it raises the question of whether there is a common source for the
various slaughterhouses/packing plants.
Food-safety
attorney Bill Marler reminds me that two of the salmonella strains in
the earlier outbreak this summer were antibiotic-resistant. The
CDC’s original
outbreak report describes
them as “resistant to amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, ampicillin,
cefoxitin, ceftiofur, and ceftriaxone. The two patients with
resistant isolates both were aged <12 months and required
hospitalization… Resistance to third-generation cephalosporins
(e.g., ceftriaxone) is clinically important because extended-spectrum
cephalosporins are commonly used for treatment of severe
salmonellosis in children.”
If
you’re curious why the CDC’s absence from this outbreak is so
critical, this description of how
the CDC works in multi-state outbreaks —
by organizing the investigation and deploying lab resources that no
other agency possesses — is helpful.
Finally,
a number of commenters have asked why this outbreak is even an issue,
assuming that people are only at risk if they undercook their
chicken. That assumes that people are only becoming sick from their
own actions and not, for instance, eating the chicken in someone
else’s home or in a restaurant. It also fails to account for
salmonella’s nimbleness at spreading off raw meat to other niches
in professional or home kitchens — a cutting board, a counter, a
towel, a sponge, the cook’s hands — and then from there in an
undetected manner to other foods. And, finally, it fails to
acknowledge that some members of the population — toddlers,
elderly, people with immune systems weakened by various medical
treatments — are more vulnerable than others. There’s no question
people should behave self-protectively. But in our regulatory system,
food safety is a shared responsibility, federal, commercial and
individual — and it only works when every party in that chain works
to the highest standard they can
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