Peanut scare exposes flaws in inspections

One afternoon last October, a state food inspector walked into the Peanut Corporation of America’s processing plant in Blakely and found a mess. She took photographs to document a “black buildup” of unknown origin in large peanut butter containers. Her report cited mildew and dust on the ceiling of a peanut butter storage room, and noted she had discovered other unsanitary conditions there three months earlier.

The inspector gave the company two weeks, until Nov. 5, to clean up. But it wasn’t until this month that any government agent returned to the plant.

By then, authorities say, salmonella-tainted products had sickened more than 500 people nationwide. Eight of them have died.

The outbreak again exposed fundamental flaws in how the government guarantees the safe production of the nation’s food supply. The inspection gaps are likely to come under scrutiny in congressional hearings that Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, announced Thursday.

In Georgia, the state Agriculture Department inspects food processing facilities on behalf of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But the state agency —- which also promotes the sale of Georgia products —- employs just 60 “sanitarians,” as the inspectors are called, to check on 16,000 processing plants, grocery stores and food warehouses statewide.

Each sanitarian, earning an average of $36,000 a year, is expected to conduct about 530 inspections a year —- one every 3 1/2 hours, including travel time, each working day of the year.

Even when inspections reveal violations of food safety laws, the state rarely imposes fines, records show. The last such penalty was a $25,000 fine against a mouse-infested Lawrenceville grocery in 2007.

“Our goal,” said Oscar Garrison, the state’s assistant agriculture commissioner for consumer protection, “is to prevent recurring violations from happening. We’re as much public health educators as we are regulators.”

At the federal level, congressional investigators and auditors have repeatedly charged that the FDA’s oversight of state inspections lacks rigor. The agency audits few state inspections, and 14 of its 17 regional offices had no formal criteria for reviewing states’ performance, according to a June 2000 report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. FDA spokesmen did not respond to requests for an interview.

Greater oversight is needed, safety advocates say, to control foodborne illnesses that send an estimated 325,000 Americans to the hospital and kill as many as 5,000 each year.

“The FDA has not been geared up to deal with the 21st-century food system, with the mass production and mass distribution and the global supply system,” said Jean Halloran, the director of food policy initiatives for the Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine. “Here is one plant in Georgia that has caused mass illness across the country, and the FDA simply isn’t equipped to deal with that.”

Georgia began inspecting the Peanut Corporation of America plant for the FDA in 2006. The FDA last inspected the plant in 2001, federal officials said.

State inspectors cited violations of food safety laws six times between 2006 and 2008. Officials characterized the violations found last October as “relatively minor.”

But what the inspectors didn’t find has come into sharp focus during the salmonella investigation.

The FDA said company documents show that on 12 occasions, it shipped peanut products that had initially tested positive for the salmonella bacteria. The FDA also said the plant’s design and maintenance allowed water to leak into sanitary areas and pests to contaminate food.

Federal officials said they would review the Georgia inspections, but stopped short of criticizing the state agency.

“I can tell you that all inspections are a snapshot in time,” Michael Rogers, the FDA’s director of field investigations, said in a conference call with reporters. “And they only reveal what is happening at the firm at that particular time.”

A senior science adviser to the FDA, Donald Zink, said inspectors could not be expected to grasp the intricacies of food processing.

“These inspectors have to go into all kinds of food processing plants and all kinds of processing technologies,” Zink said on the conference call. A plant like Peanut Corporation of America’s, he said, would use complicated systems to filter air and to restrict employee access to sanitary areas.

“Those are fairly sophisticated concepts,” Zink said. “I mean, they may sound simple in hindsight. But, you know, to an investigator that sees lots of different kinds of facilities in a year, I can see that they might not have a deep understanding of that and probe into that.”

Garrison, Georgia’s assistant agriculture commissioner, said inspectors must have a college degree with a science concentration. But the starting annual salary falls short of $30,000; the highest-paid inspector earns about $53,000 a year.

“It’s pretty hard to get a large number of applicants,” Garrison said.

Regardless, budget cuts have prevented the department from filling vacancies and forced it to cut annual inspections of most facilities in half, from four to two.

“The department has always prided itself on doing more with less,” Garrison said. “Now we’re at the point of having to do less with less.”

The FDA, too, has scaled back. From 2003 to 2006, the FDA cut its inspection force by 12 percent, according to a report by Waxman, the California congressman. During the same period, Waxman found, the number of inspections dropped by 32 percent.

The FDA has increased its reliance on state inspections, according to the Health and Human Services inspector general. But states vary in how stringently they inspect food facilities, have differing levels of enforcement authority and set their own examination schedules, the inspector general said in a report. Still, the report said, the FDA doesn’t adequately monitor state inspections, raising concerns “about the quality and uniformity” of food inspections. Halloran, of the Consumers Union, said federal authorities should have retooled the inspection system after earlier breakdowns caused widespread illnesses.

“We obviously have a problem here with inspection and enforcement,” she said. “It isn’t that states can’t do it. But the FDA doesn’t seem to have been supervising the state of Georgia or to have been in much touch with what the state was doing.”