Is Meat From Diseased Animals Safe
for
Consumption?
The USDA is imposing new rules reclassifying as "safe
for human consumption" animal carcasses with cancers,
tumors and open sores. Federal meat inspectors and consumer
groups are protesting the move to classify tumors and open
sores as aesthetic problems, which permits the meat to get
the government's purple seal of approval as a wholesome food
product.
"I don't want to eat pus from a chicken that has pneumonia.
I think it's gross," said Wenonah Hauter, director of
Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program.
"Most Americans don't want to eat this sort of contamination
in their meals." Delmer Jones, a federal food inspector
for 41 years who lives in Renlap, Ala., said he's so revolted
by the lowering of food wholesomeness standards that he doesn't
buy meat at the supermarket anymore because he doesn't trust
that it is safe to eat. "I eat very little to no meat,
but sardines and fish," said Jones, president of the
National Joint Council of Meat Inspection Locals, a union
of 7,000 meat inspectors nationwide affiliated with the American
Federation of Government Employees. He said he's trying to
get his wife to stop eating meat. "I've told her what
she's eating."
The union is battling related Agriculture Department plans
to rely on scientific testing of samples of butchered meats
to determine the wholesomeness of meat, rather than traditional
item-by-item scrutiny by federal inspectors. A 1959 federal
law requires inspectors from the Agriculture Department's
Food Inspection and Safety System to inspect all slaughtered
animals before they can be sold for human consumption. The
UDSA has extended until Aug. 29 the time for the public to
comment on the regulations, and won't issue final rules until
after the comments are received. In 1998, the inspections
and safety system reclassified an array of animal diseases
as being "defects that rarely or never present a direct
public health risk" and said "unaffected carcass
portions" could be passed on to consumers by cutting
out lesions. Among animal diseases the agency said don't present
a health danger are:
* Cancer;
* A pneumonia of poultry called airsacculitis;
* Glandular swellings or lymphomas;
* Sores;
* Infectious arthritis;
* Diseases caused by intestinal worms.
In the case of tumors, the guidelines state: "remove
localized lesion(s) and pass unaffected carcass portions."
"They just cut off the areas,'' said Carol Blake, spokeswoman
for the Agriculture Department's inspection and safety system.
But the reality is that production lines are moving so fast
that they can't catch all the diseased carcasses, and some
are ending up on supermarket shelves. "When I started
inspecting, inspectors were looking at 13 birds a minute,
then 40, and now it's 91 birds a minute with three inspectors.
You cannot do your job with 91 birds a minute," Jones
said. The Agriculture Department is also experimenting with
proposed rules that would require federal food inspectors
to monitor what the plant employees are doing, rather than
inspecting each carcass individually. They are aimed at bringing
a
new scientific approach to federal meat inspection to cut
down on E. coli bacteria and other contamination.
The inspection and safety agency says a survey of pilot plants
using the new system concluded that less than 1 percent of
the poultry examined at the end of the production line and
released for public consumption was unwholesome. At a public
hearing on the findings this year, Karen Henderson of Agriculture's
division of field operations admitted that defective carcasses
are being approved for human use under the pilot program.
"Absolutely. There's no system that we are aware
of that is capable of removing every defect from the process,"
she said.
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