Food risks draw little urgency

Federal food regulators describe a massive salmonella outbreak traced to a Georgia peanut butter plant in 2007 as “a wake-up call.” But that realization did not lead officials to scrutinize at least one other peanut processor: the Peanut Corporation of America in Blakely.

They didn’t even know the plant made peanut butter.

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DANIEL PATMORE/AP

Kentucky National Guardsman Spc. William Black writes ‘Do not issue’ onto a skid of MRE’s (meal ready to eat) Thursday Feb. 5, 2009 at the Wendell Ford Regional Training Center outside of Greenville, Ky. Kentucky stopped distributing FEMA emergency meal kits for victims of last week’s ice storm Thursday after authorities warned that the meals may include packets of peanut butter recalled because of possible salmonella.

• For all the latest developments on the peanut crisis and the salmonella outbreak, with an updated list of recalled items, plus background on the scare, go to the AJC's special report: ajc.com/peanuts.

That gaffe by the Food and Drug Administration illustrates a fundamental weakness in federal oversight of the nation’s food supply, according to food safety experts and consumer advocates. The FDA, critics say, lacks the resources and the wherewithal to take a comprehensive approach to regulating the food industry and tends to deal with outbreaks of food-borne illnesses as isolated episodes rather than as interconnected elements of a broad threat to food safety.

“It seems to take a lot to get them to pay attention to an industry,” said Jean Halloran, the director of food policy initiatives for the Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine. “You don’t see them bearing down on what the problem was and checking all the other companies.”

The FDA, she said, should emulate agencies that investigate airplane crashes: Find the cause and then make certain that necessary fixes are universally applied.

“You check all the 747s to see if they have a wing that’s about to fall off,” she said.

Federal inspectors last visited Peanut Corp.’s Blakely plant in 2001, when it discovered equipment exposed to pesticides, dirty duct tape on broken machines, dead insects near peanuts and gaps big enough for rodents to enter.

For most of the time since that inspection, the FDA considered peanut products low-risk for salmonella contamination because the manufacturing process uses little water that would allow the bacteria to thrive. Then salmonella from ConAgra Foods in Sylvester, the maker of Peter Pan peanut butter, made more than 600 people ill in 2007. The latest outbreak, traced to peanuts on Jan. 9, has been worse: eight dead, 127 hospitalized, a total of 575 people in 43 states sickened.

As the toll from contaminated peanut butter and other foods rose over the past two years, congressional investigations concluded the FDA is ill equipped to handle its food safety duties.

The agency is responsible for inspecting 80 percent of domestic and imported food products, but receives only 24 percent of federal food-safety spending. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates meat and poultry, gets 76 percent of the money for inspecting 20 percent of the food.

Wrinkles in federal law exacerbate the funding gap. The USDA inspects plants that make frozen pizzas with meat toppings. The FDA inspects the same plants if they also produce frozen pizzas topped only with cheese.

In congressional testimony, FDA officials have acknowledged they’ve shifted their focus away from what they considered to be safe foods — including, for many years, peanut butter.

The ConAgra case was the first significant salmonella outbreak traced to the peanut industry, a top FDA official, Stephen Sundlof, told the Senate Agriculture Committee last week in Washington. Afterward, the agency held seminars and other food safety education programs for peanut processors, Sundlof said, and increased inspections to check on manufacturing practices.

“We took what we thought were prudent measures,” Sundlof said.

Still, the FDA’s performance — before and after the ConAgra outbreak — left Americans vulnerable to a potentially fatal illness, government documents, congressional testimony and interviews suggest.

“It’s clear there weren’t lessons learned,” said Caroline Smith Dewaal, food safety director for the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. “The FDA is very good at responding to outbreaks. They have not been so good at preventing outbreaks.”

Salmonella in Peter Pan

The FDA first learned of possible salmonella contamination at ConAgra four years ago — two years before officials traced hundreds of illnesses to Peter Pan.

In early 2005, an anonymous tipster told the FDA that ConAgra’s internal testing had detected salmonella in a batch of peanut butter the previous October, agency records show. Company executives confirmed the test results to an FDA inspector but refused to turn over lab reports unless the agency requested them in writing. The inspector left the plant, records show, and never again requested the reports.

Congressional investigators later learned that FDA policy discouraged written document requests. Federal courts, the FDA said, had ruled that if manufacturers turned over material in response to a formal request from the government, those documents could not be used as evidence in a criminal prosecution against them. But in the vast majority of cases, investigator David Nelson told a House subcommittee in 2007, the FDA pursues neither documents nor criminal charges. Nelson termed the agency’s actions “nonsensical.”

The FDA cited no violations following the 2005 inspection in Sylvester, said Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman for ConAgra, which is based in Omaha, Neb. Long before the inspector arrived, Childs said, the plant had destroyed the contaminated peanut butter.

With no further contact from the agency, she said, “we assumed that we had satisfied the FDA’s interest.”

The FDA didn’t return to Sylvester until two years later. By then, epidemiologists had pinpointed the plant as the source of a salmonella strain that was sickening people across the country. ConAgra stopped operating the plant and spent $33 million on renovations before reopening in August 2007.

Through the ConAgra investigation, the FDA “learned more about the science of salmonella, and more about peanuts as a raw commodity that is subject to bacterial growth when water is introduced,” Michael Herndon, an agency spokesman, said last week. One result: a new training program for FDA investigators on microbiological testing. It begins this spring.

Positive tests in 2007-08

Seventy miles west of the ConAgra plant, near the Alabama border, the Peanut Corporation of America regularly conducted microbiological tests on the peanut butter and other products it manufactured in Blakely. Twelve times in 2007 and 2008, the tests detected the presence of salmonella.

The FDA knew nothing about the tests.

No federal inspector had visited the plant since 2001 when its operations consisted only of roasting and blanching peanuts, officials said last week. Under questioning from senators, the FDA’s Sundlof couldn’t pinpoint when the agency learned the plant was making peanut butter, a process that requires greater attention to sanitation.

Officials cannot say with certainty that any government agents visited Peanut Corp. between 2001 and 2006, when the FDA hired Georgia’s Agriculture Department to inspect the state’s food processors. The state agency destroys inspection records after three years, so no documents exist for the period in question.

Regardless, FDA officials acknowledged they largely ignored Peanut Corp. after the ConAgra salmonella case, since they thought it did not manufacture peanut butter. The agency did not send one of its own inspectors to Blakely even after the plant shipped peanuts mixed with metal shards to Canada last April.

Although the FDA asked Peanut Corp. to destroy the shipment, it did not flag the plant for special inspections, Sundlof said.

“Georgia was very vigilant making sure they were going to that plant on a very frequent basis,” Sundlof said.

Another FDA official, Michael Chappell, acting associate commissioner for regulation, said the agency asked the state to check on metal shard contamination during its next inspection. The state, he said, reported back that the plant had processes in place to keep metal fragments out of its products.

Two months later, a state inspector cited the company for the presence of metal flakes from a scrubber used to clean equipment. But she said the plant agreed to use “wiping cloths” instead. “Corrected on-site,” the report concluded. It contained no mention of the Canadian shipment.

An FDA supervisor in its Atlanta office reviewed that report and others from state inspections of Peanut Corp., Chappell said. The supervisor, he said, deemed the state’s evaluations to be “consistent with observations and corrections the FDA would have made.”

A state inspector visited Peanut Corp. twice in 2008 and four times in 2007. After the last visit, in October 2008, an inspector gave the plant two weeks to clean up mildew and dust in its peanut butter storage room. She never returned to the plant.

FDA investigators swarmed on the Peanut Corp. plant last month. After a 14-day investigation, the agency reported finding numerous unsanitary conditions, including the presence of cockroaches and mold. It also said the company had shipped 12 batches of peanut butter and other products that had initially tested positive for salmonella.

Peanut Corp. has declined to answer questions about its plant.

Two salmonella outbreaks in two years from similar plants is a “rarity,” said Carl Reynolds, a food safety consultant and former FDA compliance chief. “That may be a signal for them to look at that industry.”

But Sundlof told Congress that the FDA still doesn’t perceive a pattern of danger in peanut butter.

“I don’t believe this is a problem that is rampant throughout the industry,” he said. “I think this is a problem with one particular company.”

Nevertheless, he said, the agency plans to look at “what went wrong, what we could do in the future to keep this from happening again.”

Food safety experts say a more aggressive reaction to the ConAgra case — including detailed inspections of every peanut processing plant in the country — might have kept the current outbreak from happening.

“They certainly didn’t get to Peanut Corporation of America,” the Consumer Union’s Halloran said. “One has to wonder how many other plants they did get to and what they did.”