Meat Safety

The federal meat inspection is only marginally better at protecting the public from harmful bacteria than it was a year ago when several people died after eating hamburgers contaminated with E. coli bacteria. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) continues to rely on visual inspections that cannot detect such pathogens--the greatest public health threat associated with meat and poultry. USDA's efforts to improve its inspection system have skirted this inherent weakness, and USDA has not tried to require routine microbial testing by industry and government. In fiscal years 1993 and 1994, USDA budgeted about $45 million to launch 81 projects to improve its current inspection system, such as (1) mandating package labels describing how to handle and cook meat and poultry safely, (2) undertaking more than two dozen data collection and research projects, and (3) strengthening oversight of meat and poultry plants with a high-risk profile. These efforts have probably lowered the chance that people will get sick from eating contaminated meat. Consumers and restaurants are now more aware that raw meat must be properly handled and cooked to kill bacteria. Also, USDA's more vigorous enforcement of the current sanitation and slaughter processing regulations will indirectly help control bacterial contamination by eliminating some potential sources of contamination. However, USDA still needs to adopt a modern, scientific, risk-based inspection system that would allow the agency to target inspections to higher-risk meat and poultry products and to develop methods to help inspectors detect microbial contamination.