Meat Safety Rules Beefed Up E. Coli Outbreak Leads To Overhaul Of Inspection System

President Clinton on Saturday announced the most significant changes in meat safety rules in 90 years.

The new system will augment the current approach of looking at, touching and smelling meat by requiring scientific tests to detect and prevent contamination.

The radical overhaul of the nation’s meat inspection system comes three years after an outbreak of food-borne illness left hundreds of people sick and four children dead as a result of having eaten tainted hamburger. The crisis spurred the president to promise a reassessment of the country’s meat and poultry safety system, which has remained virtually unchanged since the first major meat inspection law was passed in 1906.

Saturday, flanked by several parents of children who died in the 1993 outbreak, Clinton introduced the new plan during his weekly radio address.

“These new meat and poultry contamination safeguards will be the strongest ever,” he said. “Our new food safety initiative will give families the security to know that the food they eat is as safe as it can be.”

The regulatory revamping required considerable finesse, as consumer groups insisted on tough rules, industry balked at what it called “micromanagement” by government, and federal officials looked for middle ground. But in reaching a compromise, the president added meat safety reform to an election-year list of actions on many issues popular with voters, including supporting a curfew for teenagers, school uniforms and a tuition tax credit for college educations.

“This has been a tough battle, said Nancy Donley, a Chicago real estate agent whose only child, 6-year-old son Alex, died in July 1993 after eating contaminated hamburger.

That outbreak sickened more than 600 people in Washington state and left three children dead.

“There seems to be a blanket statement that all regulation is bad,” said Donley, who with other parents and top administration officals spoke at a White House news conference after the president’s address. “But in some areas, regulation is good.”

Nearly 5 million cases of illness and more than 4,000 deaths are attributable to food poisoning each year, according to the agriculture department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Most cases are caused by bacteria from animals’ intestines, such as salmonella or various strains of E. coli.

Under the current meat safety system, more than 7,400 FSIS inspectors monitor 6,200 slaughter and processing plants in the United States, where they look for diseased animals or contaminated carcasses with so-called organoleptic methods - a fancy term for what amounts to looking at, touching and smelling the meat.

By contrast, officals said, the new system will rely on science-based strategies for preventing and detecting contamination.

The heart of that system is called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, or HACCP, which industry aficionados pronounce “hassip.” Under this program, companies must identify the points in their production processes most likely to lead to contamination, and create acceptable plans for preventing it. A similar approach was initiated last December for seafood.

The industry also will have to devise and adhere to sanitation standards and use modern tests for the presence of garden variety E. coli, a practice already common among larger companies. Although that test does not look specifically for the deadly strain of E. coli that cropped up in 1993, it is a good general test for contamination, officials said.

Also for the first time, companies will have to submit meat samples to USDA to prove that salmonella levels do not exceed federally determined limits.

Salmonella testing will start in September, officals said, and other aspects of the plan will be phased in during the next six to 18 months. Smaller plants, accounting for less than one-quarter of the nation’s meat supply, will have as long as 42 months to fully comply. Importers will be bound by the same rules.

The new system will cost the meat and poultry industry about $80 million a year during the first four years and about $110 million annually after that, or about one-tenth of a cent per pound of product, said FSIS Administrator Michael R. Taylor, who also is acting undersecretary for food safety. In return, Taylor said, the country will save between $1 billion and $4 billion a year in medical expenses, lost work and other costs of food-borne illness.

The cost to the government will be nil, officals said, although meat inspectors will have to be trained in some new practices.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Locally One case of E. coli and 22 cases of salmonella poisoning have been reported in Spokane County this year.