A USDA public meeting today in Washington, D.C., will focus on how to quickly identify suppliers of source material in products testing positive for E. coli O157:H7.
Such tracing difficulties have created a huge gap in food safety and participants in today’s meeting have a very recent case in point: the Huntington Meat Packing Inc. recall of 5.8 million pounds of ground beef products made under questionable conditions and feared to be contaminated with E. coli
When the two Huntington recalls were announced in January and February by USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the contaminated meat was said to have been distributed to restaurants, hotels and distributors in California.
But as Peter Eisler, Elizabeth Weise and Blake Morrison reported this morning in USA Today, more than 200 schools were initially overlooked as recipients. Some were not notified until mid-March and had been serving meat recalled in mid-February, if not January 18.
The tainted ground beef from Huntington had been used by a company to make tacos and burritos for school lunch and snacks. For instance, the public school district in Arlington, Texas, told USA Today that it received notification of the potential harm on February 17, five days after Huntington’s second recall. The first recall was January 18.
Food Director Jackie Anderson said she didn’t get the news through a phone call or e-mail. It came in a letter sent via regular mail from Fernando’s in Compton, California, makers of a taco snack. The district served 11,000 tacos in February that it learned later were made with recalled Huntington meat.
Even with media attention, USA Today said the number of schools affected by the breakdown in communication and tracing in the Huntington E. coli recall is still growing.
Said the food director in Arlington: “There needs to be a way to notify people earlier — obviously, if we’d known sooner, we would not have served those tacos.”
