Wall Street Journal
12-18-06
E. Coli's Enablers
The recent E. coli outbreaks are playing as a familiar morality tale of too little
regulation. The real story is a much bigger scandal: How special interests have
blocked approval of a technology that could sanitize fruits and vegetables and
reduce food poisoning in America.
The technology is known as food "irradiation," a process that propels gamma
rays into meat, poultry and produce in order to kill most insects and bacteria. It is
similar to milk pasteurization, and it's a shame some food marketer didn't call it
that from the beginning because its safety and health benefits are well
established. The American Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control
(CDC), the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization
have all certified that a big reduction in disease could result from irradiating
foods.
Says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research
at the University of Minnesota: "If even 50% of meat and poultry consumed in the
United States were irradiated, the potential impact on foodborne disease would
be a reduction in 900,000 cases, and 350 deaths." A 2005 CDC assessment
agrees: "Food irradiation is a logical next step to reducing the burden of food
borne diseases in the United States."
We asked several leading health scientists whether food irradiation could have
prevented the E. coli outbreak at Taco Bell restaurants. "Almost certainly, yes,"
says Dennis Olson, who runs a research programs on food irradiation at Iowa
State University. A recent study by the USDA's Agriculture Research Service
confirms that "most of the fresh-cut (minimally processed) fruits and vegetables
can tolerate a radiation of 1.0 kGy, a dose that potentially inactivates 99.999% of
E. coli."
So what's stopping irradiation? The answer is a combination of political pressure,
media scare tactics and bureaucratic and industry timidity. And it starts with
organic food groups and such left-wing pressure groups as Public Citizen that
have engaged in a fright campaign to persuade Americans that irradiation causes
cancer and disease. Something called the Stop Food Irradiation Project tells
consumers to tell grocers not to carry irradiated foods.
The liberal-leaning Consumer Reports gave credence to these claims in a 2003
article suggesting that the chemicals formed in meat as a result of irradiation may
cause cancer. Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook has served on the
Consumer Reports board. Eric Schlosser, author of the best-selling "Fast Food
Nation," also disparages irradiation as an "exotic technology" developed "while
conducting research for the Star Wars antimissile program." Scary.
None of these mythologies has ever been substantiated by science. The Centers
for Disease Control concluded its investigation by noting: "An overwhelming body
of scientific evidence demonstrates that irradiation does not harm the nutritional
value of food, nor does it make the food unsafe to eat." According to Paisan
Loaharanu, a former director at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations, "The safety of irradiated foods is well established through many
toxicological studies. . . . No other food technology has gone through more safety
tests than food irradiation."
The Food and Drug Administration bears some of the blame for bending to
political pressure and slowing the spread of food irradiation. The food processing
industry requested permission to apply irradiation to enhance the safety of
produce in 1999, but seven years later the agency still hasn't approved this "food
additive." The FDA does allow irradiation for meat, but it requires warning labels
that send a message to consumers that eating such beef or chicken is risky.
Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science and Health points out that
the FDA would be wiser to require that meats and produce that aren't irradiated
have a safety warning label. Those are the potentially unsafe foods.
Somehow this side of the story never seems to make it into the mainstream
media. Instead, the press replays the familiar yarn that the E. coli outbreaks are
caused by budget cuts and government collusion with industry. In fact, FDA
spending on food safety has increased to $535 million in 2006 from $354 million
in 2001, a 51% increase. (See nearby chart.) In any case, such inspections and
more regulations can never hope to prevent E. coli as well as irradiation does.
The government couldn't possibly hire enough inspectors to track the many
sources of fresh produce in the U.S.
Over the past 50 years, the U.S. has reduced by roughly half the death and
illness from foodborne disease. Yet 325,000 Americans are still hospitalized and
5,000 die each year from contaminated food. Today only about 1% of our meat
and produce is irradiated, though the technology was invented here. Such
nations as India, Mexico and Thailand are starting to irradiate most of the food
they export to the U.S., which means that produce from abroad could be safer
than that grown here. The real scandal of these E. coli outbreaks is that public
safety has taken a back seat to political correctness and bureaucratic delay at
the FDA.