U.S. Senate Poised to Take up Food Safety Reform.
By Fred Pritzker
Escherichia coli O157:H7 is an enteric pathogen that can cause life threatening hemorrhagic colitis and, in very severe cases, hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS.
In the United States every year, an estimated 70,000 to 73,000 people are infected by the bacteria, which produces a toxin that attacks red blood cells and can often lead to E. coli renal failure.
E. coli O157:H7 and HUS E. coli kills on average 61 Americans a year, but there is no known cure for the disease and it is still considered the most lethal of foodborne illness types. It usually is most devastating to small children and the elderly, but it is destructive enough to claim the lives of health adults.
Right now there is a 4-year-old child in South Carolina who is in a partially paralyzed state from suffering a stroke. That child, according to the Washington Post, is one of the 80 people in 31 states to have been sickened in the Nestle cookie dough E. coli O157:H7 outbreak of 2009.
The cookie dough outbreak is fresh on the minds of Congress, which is poised this fall when the session reconvenes to make historic changes in the way we protect our food. The Senate will take up food safety reform and hopefully pass a bill that makes a difference for consumers who are weary of large, multi-state outbreaks of Salmonella in peanut butter, E. coli O157:H7 in leafy greens and Salmonella in pistachios.
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, gave an indication of the mood in Washington this week when he spoke at Drake University in his home state.
“We can’t put it off,”Harkin said. “It is past time to modernize U.S. food safety laws and regulations.”
Earlier this year, the House passed a sweeping new food safety bill that would expand the oversight and enforcement power of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The House bill, steered by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, also has a mechanism to fund more inspections by taxing food producers once a year. Once the Senate passes its own version of a food safety law, the two chambers will hash out their differences in conference committee. The hope is to lay new legislation by the end of this year on the desk of President Obama — who has made food safety an early priority of his administration.
As part of the hearings that led up to the House bill, a client of national food safety law firm Pritzker Olsen attorneys testified in Washington about the death of his mother. Jeffrey Almer told a packed hearing room that peanut butter contaminated with Salmonella Typhimurium .accomplished something that two bouts of cancer couldn’t : it killed his mother, Shirley Mae Almer, who was a vibrant businesswoman and loving, active grandmother who lived in northern Minnesota.
The Almer family and too many other families like them will be watching what the Senate creates and what compromises are struck to pass new legislation that can bring meaningful change.
Tags: e. coli hus, ecoli children
