Congress Is a Captive of the MEAT INDUSTRY.

• Author: Lewis, Charles

With an annual lobbying budget in the millions, the nation's meatpackers are weilding considerable political clout.

In December, 1994, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl from Seattle was hospitalized with severe diarrhea and dehydration. She had gotten infected with the deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacterium from her six-year-old sister, who had eaten some dry-cured salami from San Francisco. Despite its state-of-the-art plant, the San Francisco Sausage Co. was forced to recall 10,000 pounds of Columbus Dry Salami, its flagship product, from retail stores in California, Oregon, and Washington. Of the 10,000 pounds recalled, just 1,944 pounds--about 19%--were recovered. The rest presumably was consumed by an unsuspecting public.

In all, the outbreak infected 20 people, of whom the median age was six. The two-and-a-half-year-old girl later developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious complication that can result in kidney failure and death. The outbreak was notable because it was the first known case of E. coli infection resulting from dry-cured salami. It widely had been assumed that the curing process--which included spices, garlic, salt, and lactic acid--killed the pathogen. No one knew that salami could carry the deadly bacterium. Or did they?

At least some people in the meat industry knew two years before the outbreak, The New York Times reported on Jan. 25, 1995. In an August, 1992, article in the Journal of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers concluded that O157:H7 would not likely be killed completely in fermented sausage that was not pasteurized. The study was paid for by the National Live Stock and Meat Board in Chicago, the meat industry's research organization, but neither the American Meat Institute nor the National Meat Association notified its members.

Because the salami in question was sold as a ready-to-eat product, the outbreak posed a new issue for the industry. "You can't advise the public to cook these; they come ready to eat," James Marsden of Kansas State University, then a senior scientific adviser to the American Meat Institute, told the Times. "For years, we've been accused of blaming the victim, but the victim has no role in this. The responsibility lies squarely with the industry."

Responsibility lies with Congress as well. Time and again, Capitol Hill lawmakers have ignored the growing threat to the public health posed by the meatpacking and processing industry, the producers who raise the animals they slaughter, and the distributors, wholesalers, and retailers who sell the products to the public. Despite the growing disquiet that the food on any plate very possibly might be unsafe, Congress continues to protect the food industry instead of the public health, steadfastly opposing more stringent government food inspection and safety standards.

In his 1906 novel, The Jungle, journalist Upton Sinclair described in gruesome detail the practices of the Chicago meatpackers, including this account of what went into the sausage that ended up on the nation's breakfast tables: "There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption...