Beef lawsuit keeps food safety a hot topic
By Darrell Smith - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, June 16, 2007
Cynthia Centura stopped by a Stater Bros. supermarket to pick up ground beef -- a must to make the spaghetti she was planning for dinner Sunday night menu at her home in Hemet.
She couldn't have known that the meat produced less than two hours away by a Los Angeles-area meat processor and stocked at one of the Southland's most popular supermarket chains would severely sicken her 4-year-old daughter, Lauren Fournier.
She is one of 14 people who fell ill after eating ground beef tainted with the potentially deadly bacteria E. coli O157:H7. Fournier's parents are taking Vernon-based United Food Group LLC to court in Riverside County, seeking unspecified damages.
United Food spokesman Lyle Orwig, in a prepared statement released Friday, said officials had not yet reviewed the suit but that the company "remains deeply sorry that any illnesses may have resulted from the recalled product."
United Food has opened a 24-hour, toll-free hotline at (800) 325-4164 and a Web site at www.unitedfoodgrouprecall. com for more information on the recall.
A list of recalled beef brands is also available at the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service's Web site, www.fsis.usda.gov.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday, appears to be the first legal salvo fired against United Food as debate over food safety continues to grow in the face of a 5.7 million-pound, 11-state recall of the tainted ground beef.
Troubled by the latest in a rash of recalls across the country, consumer advocates are voicing concern about food safety.
Yes, the surveillance systems that detect food-borne pathogens have improved, said Chris Waldrop, director of the Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
"At the same time, we're having recalls because people are getting sick," Waldrop added. "That's unacceptable."
He recalled the dark days of the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in the early 1990s and the combined government and industry efforts that followed to rid the food supply of E. coli bacteria.
Today, Waldrop sees a disturbing return: "It looked like (improvements in food safety) were working, but something has happened. Something's going on in the food supply chain. We need to figure out what that is. We can't let our guard down. We need to have the same level of vigilance."
Testing at beef processing plants varies from processor to processor, but relies on a combination of industry and USDA guidelines and beef industry "best practices."
In a 2006 Texas A&M study prepared for the beef industry, examples included
sampling finished ground beef products every 15 minutes to test specifically for E. coli O157:H7; documenting the source of raw material through lot or serial numbers; and discouraging the introduction of excess meat into the processing flow.
The United Foods recall is the largest of a number of recalls in recent months. In all, more than 6 million pounds of ground beef and related products have been recalled from stores and distribution sites in 25 states since April.
In Fournier's case, court records show, the E. coli bacteria lodged in the child's large intestine and began to shut down her kidneys. She spent three weeks in a San Diego hospital recovering from the illness.
All of the signs -- the cramping, the dehydration, the bloody diarrhea -- pointed to the same E. coli strain in last September's spinach scare. In that case, three people died and 205 others were sickened across 26 states.
Fournier was not the only person to fall ill after eating the tainted ground beef. It also sickened two people in nearby Los Angeles County, two in Colorado, six in Arizona and others in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming.
"What do you tell people?" said Elisa Odabashian, West Coast director of the nonprofit Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports. "Beef doesn't have a label on it. It's produced in a huge lot. You really don't know."
The list is long and growing longer, and it's not just beef: E. coli in spinach, salmonella in peanut butter, melamine in pet food, poisonous diethylene glycol in toothpaste.
Undermanned and underfunded, regulatory agencies and industries overseeing their own safety practices are only part of the problem and do little to bolster consumer confidence in the nation's food supply, Odabashian said.
"We're sitting ducks right now. No one's ensuring for safety at this point," Odabashian said.
An investigation continues into how the beef was contaminated.
"We want to understand what happened. What was it that did this?" said William Marler of Seattle firm Marler Clark LLC, one of the attorneys representing Lawrence Fournier and Cynthia Centura in the case.
Marler, who specializes in food safety cases, won multimillion-dollar settlements in high-profile E. coli cases in the 1990s, including a 1993 case against Jack in the Box after contaminated burgers sickened 144 people who ate at the fast-food chain.
"Why did United wait for consumers to get sick?" Marler said. "There was a failure in the system somewhere."
About the writer:
The Bee's Darrell Smith can be reached at (916) 321-1040 or
[email protected]