Cargill announces massive ground turkey recall

Lisa Schnirring * Staff Writer

CIDRAP >> Cargill announces massive ground turkey recall

Aug 3, 2011 (CIDRAP News) – Cargill Value Added Meats, a Cargill Meat Solutions Corp. unit based in Wichita, Kan., announced late today that it was recalling about 36 million pounds of fresh and frozen ground turkey produced at its Springdale, Ark., facility, because of possible links to a multistate Salmonella Heidelberg outbreak.

The recall covers ground turkey produced at the Springdale facility from Feb 20 through Aug 2, Cargill said in a statement. The company said it initiated the recall based on its internal investigation, as well as findings of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Cargill, a privately held multinational company based in Minnesota, is the nation's third largest turkey producer, according to a 2009 estimate. Brands subject to the recall include ground turkey chubs, 85% ground turkey, 93% ground turkey, ground patties, and frozen ground patties in various packaging types and sizes.

Affected brands include Honeysuckle White, several grocery store labels, bulk items, and a few others.

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) said today in an e-mailed recall notice that the products bear the number "P-963" inside the USDA inspection mark.

Trace-back investigations and in-plant Salmonella findings, as epidemiologic evidence, link the illnesses to the Cargill ground turkey products, the USDA said.

Cargill said products produced at its three other turkey processing facilities are not part of a recall, nor are other types of products from the Springdale plant. It is suspending ground turkey production at its Springdale unit until the source of Salmonella contamination is found.

"We are closely examining every aspect of our production process and have identified enhancements to our procedures in our efforts to ensure safe food," said Steve Willardsen, president of Cargill's turkey processing business in the statement. "Eliminating foodborne illness is always our goal."

"Public health and the safety of consumers cannot be compromised. It is regrettable that people may have become ill from eating one of our ground turkey products and, for anyone who did, we are truly sorry," he said.

So far the Salmonella Heidelberg outbreak has sickened 79 people in 26 states, an increase of two patients from the initial outbreak report. The outbreak is also linked to the death of a California resident, according to the CDC.

Earlier in the week the FSIS said it didn't have enough evidence to link the illnesses to a specific producer or facilitiy.

The federal government doesn't classify Salmonella as an adulterant in meat, and microbiologic testing that found the outbreak strain in at least three ground turkey samples was done as part of routine surveillance for antibiotic-resistant strains and not prompted by illness reports.

Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), said his group thinks Salmonella should be considered an adulterant and that antibiotic-resistant strains increase the risks.

Salmonella Heidelberg is one of four antibiotic-resistant strains that the Center for Science in the Public Interest,a nutrition and food safety advocacy group, recently petitioned the USDA to declare as adulterants in ground meat and poultry. The CDC has said the resistant strains can lead to more hospitalizations and difficult-to-treat infections. Classifying them as adulterants would trigger testing and earlier product recalls.

Waldrop told CIDRAP News that Salmonella in turkey has decreased in recent years. He said FSIS data have shown the baseline level has dropped from about 20% in the mid to late 1990s to an estimate of 1.7% in the last 2 years.

David A. Halvorson, DVM, an avian health expert at the University of Minnesota, said turkeys and other poultry are taken from barns where they have been living on litter, a mixture of bedding and feces, then processed in several steps, none of which are performed in sterile conditions.

"The net microbiological effect is that pathogens present in and on the bird are being reduced all along the line—probably from billions of bacteria per live bird to tens or hundreds per processed bird," he said. "But none of these steps can eliminate any pathogens."

Ground meat production involves mixing meat from multiple animals, so one animal that is infected with Salmonella mixed in with meat from 100 uninfected ones, for example, can result in a lot of potentially tainted meat, Halvorson said. "So any ground product is more likely to be positive than an individual piece of meat."

Halvorson said producers are constantly looking for new ways to reduce problems and improve their product, and so it is likely that improvements will be made. "What I don't see happening is the production of raw ground meat product that is free of pathogens. This is true of almost any raw product," he added.

News editor Robert Roos contributed to this story.

See also:

Aug 3 Cargill press release

National Turkey Federation background information

__________________
"Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it."-- Mark Twain

"Inter arma silent Musae"--when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent.

An't nanum hearm deth, doth hwaet ye willath.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

Economic Left/Right: -3.88
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.36

ugh... I got some chicken from a pizza place on tues that did a number on my bowels later that night...

Wonder if the "chicken product" had some turkey in it, or something.

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Righteousness will always be the trap at the gates of hell

Apparently the US Department of Agriculture has been investigating this problem, which has been occurring since March, but it does not have the power to actually do anything about it:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Food Safety and Inspection
Service (FSIS) has monitored numerous recalls of meat and poultry products sold in
the United States. The recalls have involved beef products possibly contaminated
with E. coli O157:H7, beef and poultry products possibly contaminated with
Salmonella, and canned meat products possibly contaminated by botulism. These
recalls raise issues of consumer confidence in the meat industry and questions of the
adequacy of the USDA oversight of these products.

The issue received new attention in February 2008, when USDA announced the
largest-ever recall, of 143.4 million pounds of fresh and frozen beef products from
a California slaughterer-processor. The Class II recall (meaning only a remote
possibility of adverse health effects) was in response to evidence that nonambulatory
(“downer”) cattle had been mistreated and periodically slaughtered for food, in
violation of a federal humane slaughter law and of meat safety regulations,
respectively.

Currently, USDA does not have authority to mandate a recall of meat and
poultry products. Rather, USDA, through FSIS, monitors food companies’ recalls.
When FSIS learns of a potential recall, it convenes a recall committee, which makes
recommendations based on information such as any pertinent production and
distribution data provided by the company. Once the company initiates a recall, FSIS
immediately issues a press release to notify the public, posts it on its website, and
provides information directly to stakeholders — including Congress, the media,
federal, state, and local officials, and constituents — via e-mail and faxes. At the
conclusion of the recall, FSIS conducts an effectiveness check to determine whether
all appropriate parties were properly notified and all reasonable efforts were made to
retrieve, destroy, or return the recalled product to the firm. [...]

So when agricultural producers have decided that they have poisoned enough people that they ought to do something about it, the USDA tags along on their coat tails.

Small government and the efficient markets hypothesis in action.

For five minutes I was sitting here thinking that "ground turkey" was some sort of specific breed of turkey - like a tree sloth or whatever. Then I realised it was turkey all mushed up and felt a little ill.

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Quote:

For five minutes I was sitting here thinking that "ground turkey" was some sort of specific breed of turkey

Initially so did I. Australia has a native bird sometimes called the bush turkey:



So a ground turkey was easy to imagine. But if I am not mistaken, what Americans call "ground" meat is what we in civilised culinary societies call mince. If properly produced without gratuitous addition of salmonella, it is the basis for many good recipes.

Interestingly, as another demonstration of the benefits of free markets, in the United States it is perfectly legal to distribute food containing salmonella:

[...] Salmonella, the organism in question, is not classified by the federal government as something that is illegal to distribute.

In food-safety regulation, there’s a concept called “adulterant”, a substance that by law may not be distributed in food. When you hear the word, what springs to mind is probably Upton Sinclair-style additives such as sawdust and plaster. But foodborne disease organisms can be adulterants also. The best-known is undoubtedly E. coli O157, which was declared an adulterant in 1994, one year after the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak that killed 4 children and put 171 in the hospital.

Salmonella, though, is not an adulterant. The federal government has never named it one, despite pleas from nonprofit organizations such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which in May filed a petition with the USDA that specifically asked for drug-resistant Salmonella — the organism in this outbreak — to be declared an adulterant so that extra preventative steps could be authorized according to law. The USDA has not acted on the request.

(Resistant Salmonella isn’t the only outbreak-causing organism that activists believe should be declared an adulterant. Crusading food-safety attorney Bill Marler — who began his career representing the Jack-in-the-Box victims — since 2009 has been pressing the federal government to add other major E. coli strains to the adulterant category, including the E. coli O104 that caused widespread illness in Europe this summer.)

Declaring an organism an adulterant doesn’t only make it illegal for food producers to distribute. It also imposes a duty on federal food-safety agencies to detect its presence in food so as to prevent its distribution. When USDA accepted E. coli O157 as an adulterant in 1994, the agency created a sampling and testing program that operates within the food-production industry to detect the organism and stop it before it goes out the plant loading dock. No such program exists for resistant Salmonella, even though there have been 29 known outbreaks of resistant Salmonella in food in the United States since the 1970s. [...]

Given the lack of oversight of the US food chain, to call it "all mushed up" may be a kindness.