Anniversary of an outbreak
Tomorrow marks one year since E. coli-contaminated spinach was harvested from a field in California's Salinas Valley. One month from today will mark a year from the date US health officials - the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control - confirmed that that spinach was the source of a nationwide E. coli outbreak, and announced that all bagged spinach products were being recalled for possible E. coli contamination.
In an article for the LA Times yesterday, Marla Cone wrote about what Earthbound Farms, the company that processed and packaged the spinach identified as the source of last year's outbreak, has done to improve the safety of its products since the outbreak. The company, which is the largest producer of gourmet salad greens, hired food safety microbiologist Mansour Samadpour to set up a testing lab just days after the outbreak was traced to the company's products. Dr. Samadpour instituted a testing regimen that is the most aggressive in the leafy greens industry. All products are now checked for pathogens when they arrive at the processing plant and when they are through processing.
Marla Cone wrote:
The testing has confirmed what Samadpour already suspected: Inevitably, some crops are still contaminated with disease-causing bacteria. The challenge for the company is to make sure none reaches consumers. Hunting down pathogens in produce has become a personal crusade at Earthbound Farm. In the year since the E. coli outbreak, the company has subjected about 120 million pounds of salad greens to new testing methods at a cost of several million dollars. Other companies have mounted costly safety efforts, but no one else tests all greens."We're not going to rest until we explore every possible safety improvement," said Daniels, vice president of food quality and safety.
For consumers, there's more at stake than one company's obsession to make amends for a tragedy. It's a question of whether pre-cut, bagged salads, consumed in increasing volumes, can ever be rendered safe -- as pathogen-free as, say, a glass of pasteurized milk.
Statistics show that E. coli is still present in the fields of Earthbound Farms' suppliers. According to the article, a load of fresh produce from a farm fails testing about once a week. Dr. Samadpour commented on the testing process that so far no other company has copied:
"Companies that don't test their products are putting themselves 100% at the mercy of their wash system, which everyone admits will not remove bacteria that is tightly attached or internalized."
More outbreaks are bound to happen, but it is nice to see a company that has learned its lesson and is trying to change the system and prevent another outbreak from coming from its products.
