Summary

Further excerpts from the Senate hearing on food safety.

Source CONUS Archive
Record ID 257883
Story Slug SENATE HEARING / FOOD SAFETY #2 (1997)
Location WASHINGTON, DC
Format TVD
Date 10/8/1997
Archive Time 19:21
TRT 5:04
Supers 1) Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) 2. Michael T. Osterholm / State Epidemiologist and Chief Acute Disease Epidemiology Section, Minnesota Department of Health 3) Carol Tucker Foreman / Safe Food Coalition 4) Gary Jay Kushner / Partner, Hogan and Hartson representing the American Meat Institute 5) Tom Billy / Administrator, Food Safety and Inspection Service
Description Further excerpts from the Senate hearing on food safety.
Script (SUGGESTED TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO) Unknown Speaker 00:01 And it's not just in the plant to I've got information that trucks go out and deliver meat, they've got some leftover, they come back the end of the day and they dump it back into supply. Again, a lot of times that meat then is taken it could be frozen and put back in the stream again, and I'm just wondering how, Mr. Secretary, you ever initiate a recall plan? If you don't have adequate tracing on this and paperwork and finding out you know, Unknown Speaker 00:25 foodborne diseases are critical problem. For us today, as Senator Harkin just mentioned, and recent studies that our group has conducted looking at random segments of the population. We have found that previous estimates of foodborne disease in this country grossly underestimate the extent of the real problem. We believe that there now are more than 250 million episodes of foodborne disease which occur in this country each year. Clearly, it is now the number one reason for visits to our nation's emergency rooms. Hopefully we will radiate radiation or as we like to call it ionizing pasteurization, as many of us believe is the term that might ultimately be accepted. Of these same food items with low doses of gamma rays, X rays or electrons can and will effectively control bacterial and parasitic foodborne pathogens. public concern similar to those raised against thermal pasteurization of milk have been advanced in opposition to the use of this technology. And it has been claimed that if we just paid more attention to sanitation and proper cooking, these products could be safely consumed without introducing new technologies. Perhaps Unknown Speaker 01:30 we do have some concerns about worker safety when there is a radioactive source, Mr. Chairman, but those do not apply to electronic pasteurization, which seems to have an especially safe store source. Our greatest concern, and it really is a big concern is that the industry will think this is a silver bullet, that we will be pushed in a way that trades sanitation. For radiation, we think that would be devastating to the industry. irradiated poop may be sterile, but it's still poop. And consumers don't want it in their meat and poultry. The USDA has been moving toward very high sanitation. Unknown Speaker 02:22 It's true the technically speaking, the Department of Agriculture in the absence of a court order, which I'll come back to in a moment, cannot force a company legally to recall a suspect product. However, the agency has several enforcement tools in its arsenal to make sure that that product gets removed from the market promptly. And to make sure that a company that refuses to follow the law is same for Unknown Speaker 02:43 here. And the question I come from, will give you all this new authority. I'm not sure that it's going to it's going to be able to increase consumer confidence because of the way that you're conducting their operation. Right now, the way USDA is operating the way it's testing. I mean, you say they need to notify you right away? Well, as you as you probably know, I don't know Mr. Billy knows, there was a posting on a website of a possible recall, of a business that came came out of a federal police office. Now a possible recall is bad. As I recall, Unknown Speaker 03:19 we have met with industry and talk to them about a variety of practices in this category called rework. And based on those discussions, we are developing a set of what we're going to call good manufacturing practices, that would be a set of guidelines that would apply to this area. I have to tell you, though, that there's not a uniform approach. In terms of rework, there are many plants that produce hamburger and other products, that when they have leftover material after a day's production, they send that leftover material to the cooking line, or they limit its use in terms of the next day's production by confining it to a very specific time period and a separate code. So there's there a lot of difference that can be associated with poultry products. We have a job to do to convince American consumers that it's a safe process, and that it and I harken back to the turn of the century when we started pasteurizing milk. And there was a lot of public outcry and the statements were made. You're not going to pasteurize my milk yet today it's commonplace occurrence on our milk products. And I think we're at that stage our control Unknown Speaker 04:39 when when you produce on stage food, which is the only one of these that I think better protects consumers from unsafe foods by strengthening USDA A's ability to pull all assessments that all have inspectors of plant refuse to destroy, condemned product and criminal penalties for people who sold food And that was unfit for human consumption right
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