A Plateful of Trouble

We have the safest food supply in the world, but is it good enough?

Holes in the Net

Karen Wysocki was seven months pregnant with her first child when she began to feel what she thought were gas pains on August 14, 2002. Her pregnancy had been uneventful, so this bout of discomfort didn't worry her much. It began to, though, when it persisted as she left her New York City office for her home on Long Island that evening.

Within hours, the pains grew sharper. She called her doctor, who sent her to the emergency room. Tests showed an infection that threatened her life -- and her unborn child's.

Doctors performed a successful emergency cesarean section. But the child, a boy Karen and her husband, Dennis, named Matthew, was deathly ill. For six days, he lay in intensive care, attached to every imaginable piece of neonatal lifesaving equipment. When the infection began attacking his brain, it was clear he couldn't survive. The Wysockis decided to remove him from life support. Before the baby died, Dennis held his tiny body. Matthew opened his eyes and struggled to breathe on his own. Then he was gone.

Before Matthew died, doctors told the Wysockis what was killing him: listeriosis, a disease caused by a bacterium that can be found in processed meat or poultry. The killer had come from something his mother ate.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the federal agency that safeguards meat and poultry, justifiably boasts that this country's food supply is one of the world's safest. And there has been progress in fighting the four major pathogens that account for most hospitalizations and deaths in cases with a known cause.

From 1996 to 2003, the estimated disease rates for three of the four pathogens fell: Campylobacter by 28%, Salmonella by 17% and E. coli by 42%. With Listeria, the rate didn't change significantly.

But what happened to the Wysockis isn't an isolated case. It's a symptom of a serious problem. Six years after a major overhaul, there are still holes in the safety net meant to protect our food supply. The federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that contaminated food -- everything from almonds and juice to chicken and eggs -- causes an estimated 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths each year. Bacteria find their way into food at every stop along the trail from farm to table -- barnyard, slaughterhouse, processing plant, butcher shop and family kitchen. Scientists can't say for sure where contamination is most likely to occur. Because fecal contamination is often the culprit, meat and poultry are frequent sources.

Meanwhile, there's another relevant statistic to consider: In 2002, 61 million pounds of meat products were recalled, almost twice the prior year's figure. Because recalls often happen only after people get sick, the tainted meat was in stores and grocery carts even though it might well have been caught at the plant. (Only a fraction of what's recalled is actually returned to the processor.)

About the time Matthew Wysocki was fighting for life, school bus driver Raymond Drayton, 75, was found unconscious by his wife in his Philadelphia home. Drayton, a Crohn's disease sufferer, had complained of feeling poorly. He died within days. On September 10, in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, Dana Patterson suffered a miscarriage 13 weeks into her first pregnancy. Three months later, in upstate New York, Monica and Timothy Jasmin's seven-month-old fetus was stillborn on December 14. In each of these cases, listeriosis was the culprit.

There are many causes of food contamination: the steady emergence of new germs; processing practices that may boost the risk of infection; the ongoing pressure to produce food at ever lower prices.

"The only way to make money in this business is to increase line speeds," says a retired USDA inspector. "There is constant pressure to get product down the line as quick as possible. You just hope the sanitizer rinse catches the problem."

But plenty of problems aren't being caught -- despite a revamped inspection regimen aimed at doing just that.

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