Last year — long before pushing Cargill Inc. to recall turkey linked to a salmonella outbreak that has killed one person and sickened 77 others — federal inspectors discovered three samples of a dangerous form of the bacteria.
And, as The Wall Street Journal reports, federal officials detected the Heidelberg strain of salmonella at Cargill’s Springdale, Ark., plant four more times since then.
So why did Cargill, with the U.S. Agriculture Department, wait until Aug. 3 to announce the recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey from the Springdale plant? Food safety specialists said the delay reflects federal rules and a key legal ruling that don’t treat salmonella as a poisonous contaminant, even if inspectors find antibiotic-resistant forms such as the Heidelberg strain.
Strains of salmonella such as Heidelberg have become a serious health threat because they cannot be treated with some common antibiotics, and left untreated, infections can be fatal.
Elisabeth Hagen, the Agriculture Department’s top food-safety official, told the Journal that the agency is under constraints when it comes to salmonella, and that unlike E. coli, salmonella isn’t officially considered dangerous when found in meat unless the tainted food causes an illness or death.
A routine inspection last year of the Springdale plant found three samples contaminated with salmonella Heidelberg, which were brought “to the attention of the facility,” the agency said. But federal standards allow up to 49.9 percent of meat tests to come back positive for salmonella, and a Cargill spokesman said the Springdale plant had passed those standards.
Later on, more warning signs emerged.
Salmonella Heidelberg was found in retail stores in April, when researchers from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, which inspects meat samples in retail stores, found salmonella in a package of ground turkey from Cargill’s Springdale plant.
But even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knew about the finding, the agency didn’t immediately take action on Cargill’s turkey because the meat had not yet been linked to the illnesses, an agency official said.
In May, however, the CDC began investigating clusters of salmonella Heidelberg infections that had been reported over the previous two months.
As the outbreak spread, more evidence of salmonella Heidelberg in turkey from the Cargill plant was found in May, June and July, and the company finally was informed by the Agriculture Department on July 29.
Doug Powell, a Kansas State University professor of food safety, said government agencies were “clearly too slow” in informing the public, and Cargill, of the ground turkey contamination.
Hagen said her department is considering a petition submitted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest to declare antibiotic-resistant forms of salmonella as adulterants. That could give officials the authority to act more quickly, as they can with outbreaks of E. coli.
Yet the Agriculture Department has tried, and failed, before to respond more aggressively to salmonella contamination. It was blocked when it tried to shut down a Texas ground-beef plant in 1999 by a federal appeals court. The court ruled that salmonella was naturally occurring and didn’t present a threat so long as people cooked their meat thoroughly.
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