Beef Wars.

• Author: WEINBERG, WINKLER

Is the USDA's E. coli policy undercooked?

ONE EARLY MORNING IN AUGUST 1998, Frank Bauer arrived at his Ocala, Florida meat packing plant to find some 30 government agents from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scouring every corner of the family-owned company. Investigators seized all the office computers and documents, and all the company's meat was considered "government evidence," according to a search warrant.

Bauer Meat was an unlikely target for such a huge government raid. The 50-year-old company had faithfully followed all current government regulations, monitored by two on-site USDA inspectors, and it had never been cited for violations of meat handling regulations. In the mid-'70s, Frank Bauer had actually made national headlines for exposing corruption among government meat inspectors.

But two months earlier in Atlanta, an outbreak of illness from the deadly bacteria E. coli O157:H7 was indirectly linked to beef sold by Bauer Meats, and the USDA was hell-bent on a crackdown. After the raid, the USDA informed Bauer that it was withdrawing its two inspectors from his plant. Without inspectors, a plant cannot legally sell food in interstate commerce. The move essentially shut down the Bauer Meat Company. After receiving the news, Frank Bauer retreated to the ranch where he kept his prized Angus herd. He placed his own 40 mm semiautomatic handgun to his right temple and pulled the trigger.

Despite its tragic ending, the USDA's move to close Bauer Meats represented a victory for food-safety activists. Ever since the famous 1993 Jack-in-the-Box debacle, in which burgers contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 sickened 732 people and killed four children, activists have been demanding greater action from the government to prevent food-born illnesses.

But the events leading up to Frank Bauer's suicide illustrate how consumer activists' well-intentioned demands for safer food have driven the USDA to take extreme measures that punish business but do little to actually improve the safety of the food supply. The USDA's "zero tolerance" policy for policing the American beef supply for E. coli ignores basic science, and it has led the agency to recall millions of pounds of beef and shutter dozens of plants while neglecting the effective--and sometimes simple--measures that it can take to protect public health.

The Other White Water

Bauer's tragic story started a few months earlier, back in Georgia. On June 11,1998, the temperature in Atlanta was over 90 degrees, but the chlorine reading taken from "Captain Kid's Cove" pool at Atlanta's White Water Park was as low as the instrument would measure. The pool's chlorinator was on the fritz, and several parents would report later that they had seen signs of fecal matter in the pool and on a water slide.

Five days later, six Atlanta metro-area children, including the son of Atlanta Braves baseball player Walt Weiss, were hospitalized, suffering from kidney failure, bloody diarrhea, and other symptoms of a deadly E. coli O157:H7 infection. The bacteria are usually spread to humans through undercooked beef and other food sources, but fecal matter is also a common vector. In all, 26 cases of E. coli O157:H7 would be traced to the water park. One two-year-old girl would die and another toddler would remain in a coma for months to come. (Full disclosure: Dr. Weinberg served briefly as a scientific consultant to White Water Park's owners.)

The E. coli outbreak became a national story, driven by public interest organizations, such as Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), and panicked parents who demanded government action. Bill Marler, a renowned food-safety lawyer who had won record judgments against Jack-in-the-Box, showed up in Atlanta ready to sign up clients. As part of the investigation, health officials performed a rapid "DNA fingerprinting" to try to identify the source of the infection.

The bacteria were initially tied to a beef lot that had Sickened 11-year-old Stephen Tyler Roberts, who had nearly died from kidney failure after eating an undercooked hamburger in the...