House Panel Scraps Meat Inspection Plan Nethercutt Among Those Voting To Freeze Program Developed In Response To E. Coli Deaths

A powerful House panel voted Tuesday to scrap President Clinton’s new meat inspection system for nine months - a move safety advocates say could severely undermine a program developed in response to a 1993 food-poisoning outbreak in Washington state.

By a 26-15 vote, the Appropriations Committee backed an amendment that would freeze the program for nine months and require the Agriculture Department, which runs food safety inspections, to conduct negotiations with the meat industry and other interested parties on a modified plan.

The delay measure, opposed by Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., but supported by Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., now goes to the House floor as part of the Agriculture appropriations spending bill. It is given a good chance of winning approval there. Consumer advocates are pinning their hopes for reversing the move on the Senate.

“It’s a modest approach,” said amendment sponsor Rep. James Walsh, R-N.Y. He said it is needed because the administration had consulted the meat inspectors union more often than the meat industry before coming up with its safety plan - and because USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service chief Mike Taylor was at loggerheads with industry.

But Dicks, arguing against Walsh’s amendment, said lives are at stake.

He noted the administration program, which would upgrade slaughter plant sanitation and include scientific tests to spot lethal bacteria, was prompted in large part by an outbreak of food poisoning in the Seattle area in early 1993. Three children died and hundreds were sickened from eating undercooked Jack in the Box hamburgers tainted with E. coli bacteria.

The outbreak drew national attention to shortcomings of a system in which the inspectors rely on sight and smell to inspect meat. E. coli can be detected only through laboratory tests.

Public health is at stake and a system overhaul is long overdue, Dicks said, adding that “delaying this even further is unacceptable.” He warned that an estimated 7,000 people die in the United States each year from food poisoning.

Walsh said negotiations on a new safety plan would take only nine months.

But Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman warned in a letter to Appropriations Chairman Bob Livingson, R-La., that such negotiations could postpone implementation of the program, now due to begin next year, by some two-and-a-half years.

“We cannot afford to delay. … As pathogen outbreaks occur, it could prove devastating to all interests - consumers, producers and industry,” he wrote.

Carol Foreman, spokeswoman for the Safe Food Coalition of consumer groups, said it appears that the meat industry and congressional Republicans in Congress are trying to stall implementation until next year’s presidential election, in hopes that a Republican more sympathetic to the meat industry would be elected.

Nethercutt said after the vote that the meat industry deserves more of a role in formulating a safety plan and that this would not undermine public health.

“It’s not in the meat or chicken industry’s best interest to have people get sick or die,” he said.

He argued that it is unfair to cite deaths of children from E. coli poisoning under the old system to argue against a new system that might emerge from talks with industry and other parties.

But Foreman wondered how any representative of Washington state could vote to delay the administration’s program, given the outbreak in the region in 1993.

She said that showed that a safer system is needed quickly and that implementation must not be delayed, she said.

“I hope (Nethercutt) hears from the parents out there. This new Congress was supposed to be different but in the end acted like the Congress they threw out - they kicked under to a powerful industry,” she said.

After the vote, Glickman said he was disappointed in the outcome and hoped Congress would reverse it.

The American Meat Institute, the industry’s chief lobbying group, said: “We are pleased that the committee has sent a clear message to the Department of Agriculture to involve all interested parties in the development of new … regulations.”

Elisa Harrison, spokeswoman for the National Cattlemen’s Association, said the vote was positive because “the producers haven’t been given equal weight to unions and consumers.”