Confusion grows in beef recall

From soup to jerky, the list of products made with recalled beef has been growing, and messages to consumers have gotten ever more confusing.

Makers of kitchen standbys like Hunt's spaghetti sauce and Hot Pockets have asked grocery stores to yank selected items from their shelves – but aren't telling anyone at home to clean out their pantries.

"The USDA has characterized the health risk as negligible," said Kirstie Foster, a spokeswoman for General Mills, explaining why the company has begun a "retail" recall but not a "consumer" recall for its Progresso Italian Wedding soup.

As regulators and businesses cope with the nation's biggest beef recall, the tradeoffs of cost and risk seem to be getting murkier instead of clearer.

Some are speculating that the Humane Society's dramatic video of abused cattle at a Southern California slaughterhouse had more to do with the recall decision than any rigorous safety evaluation of the meat itself.

"You can't run away from the video of horrifically treated animals," said food safety attorney William Marler. "That, combined with a lot of the product going to school districts – the political pressure was too much."

Marler, a Seattle lawyer with a national reputation representing people sickened by bad food, fears "a lot of resources are being wasted on this recall" that could be better spent combatting more serious dangers.

The Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. in Chino recalled 143 million pounds of beef after federal investigators concluded Westland improperly processed cows unable to stand, a potential symptom of mad cow disease.

Since mid-February, the recall pyramid has been widening, its spread tracked in California by a new law aimed at increasing recall disclosure. Such tracking is another recall expense, mounting along with federal monitoring costs and the losses to businesses small and large.

While no one yet has put a price tag on the recall, it could be "very bad news" for companies that had nothing to do with mistreating cattle, said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

"This is clearly the most destabilizing event for the meat industry in decades if not 100 years," DeWaal said.

For DeWaal and others, the recall underscores problems with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as it struggles with antique regulations and dual roles of promoting and policing agriculture.

Few people trust the USDA to rationally measure dangers and determine the scope of the reaction, DeWaal said, arguing that job should be given to an impartial agency.

The hazard posed by this beef is still being debated.

The beef industry has flat-out called the meat perfectly safe. Craig Wilson, a food safety vice president at Costco, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying it was "morally and ethically wrong" to be destroying this "safe" food, although he declined to elaborate when contacted by The Bee.

In making this a Class II recall, the USDA has earmarked the beef as posing a "remote probability" of "adverse health effects."

Those adverse effects are twofold.

One risk is a rare but fatal brain disorder caused by eating meat from cattle with BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The other is contracting the more common salmonella or E. coli that can come from improperly cleaned meat and sometimes take a lethal turn.

Multiple safeguards are in place against both, said Dr. Glenn Morris, who helped write current food safety regulations and now directs the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida.

Asked to evaluate the danger of eating a can of soup with some recalled beef in it, Morris said, "I can tell you as a physician … the risk is vanishingly small."

Forget salmonella and E. coli in that can, he said, because soup processing would have killed any. Besides that, the meat should have been free of both because hides that carry the greatest disease risk are cleaned and intestines removed after slaughter.

Mad cow disease is more complex.

"The problem with BSE is it's not going to be killed by the canning process or by cooking," said Morris. "It is extremely difficult to kill prions," the proteins that can travel from diseased cattle to humans, causing variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The United States has relied on a range of strategies against mad cow. It has banned cattle remains from cattle feed since 1997, as a way to limit the spread of BSE from one cow to another. It requires special removal of tissues likeliest to transmit the disease, including brains, spinal cords and nerve ganglia. It also randomly monitors U.S. herds.

On top of all that, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob is hard to get – relatively few people contracted it in Britain even when many were exposed.

Still, since the Chino slaughterhouse didn't follow rules on "downer" cows, one unsettling question is whether other procedures to keep meat safe also might have been disregarded.

"It makes you very nervous about what else we don't know, what other systems are failing in these plants," said DeWaal.

For its part, the USDA has declined to speak in detail about its reasoning for the recall's scope, other than to stress that because downer cows were processed without a vet's permission, the beef "was produced in noncompliance with our regulations."

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