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Recalled beef from Chino slaughterhouse was used in 466 food

flounder

Well-known member
Recalled beef from Chino slaughterhouse was used in 466 food products


10:05 PM PDT on Wednesday, March 19, 2008

By JANET ZIMMERMAN
The Press-Enterprise

PDF: Businesses that may have received the meat

http://www.pe.com/multimedia/pdf/2008/WestlandRecallConsolidatedRetailDistributionforWeb3-18-08.pdf


PDF: Recalled products

http://www.pe.com/multimedia/pdf/2008/AdditionalProductsContainingWestlandRecalledBeef03-14-08.pdf


From Slim Jim jerky and Jenny Craig meatloaf to Farmer John salami and Kids Cuisine frozen tacos, the list of products containing recalled meat from the now-closed Chino slaughterhouse continues to grow.

The California Department of Public Health now lists 466 types of foods sold to markets, restaurants, grocery chains, catering businesses, workplace cafeterias and other food services. The state expects the list to get longer, department spokeswoman Lea Brooks said.

"We're identifying more products in which the recalled beef was an ingredient," she said.

When the list debuted in late February, it contained products from three manufacturers. Now there are 16. The recall may not involve entire product lines. The links to affected lot numbers and retail distributors are listed on the California Department of Public Health Web site: www.cdph.ca.gov

Also growing is the list of California restaurants, markets and other retailers that may have received some of the 143 million pounds of beef from Westland/Hallmark Meat Co.

The recall, the largest beef recall in U.S. history, was triggered by an undercover video shot by the Humane Society of the United States showing employees at the plant abusing cattle and violating federal slaughter rules.

Still at issue is who will pay for the losses. Industry experts have said the value of the affected foods could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

Westland/Hallmark President Steve Mendell testified before a congressional subcommittee last week that his company is broke and won't be able to reimburse distributors or the many schools that received his meat products through the National School Lunch Program.

The recall, which covered meat from cattle slaughtered at the plant between Feb. 1, 2006, and Feb. 2, 2008, is a class II recall, which means the chance of getting sick from the meat is remote.

In Riverside County, one restaurant was found to have some recalled meat. None has been found by public health officials in San Bernardino County, and the chances lessen as time passes, they said. Most has been consumed, destroyed or returned to the manufacturer, said Steve Van Slocum, Riverside County's deputy director of environmental health on Wednesday.

As recently as last week, Ralphs and Food 4 Less, which have 400 stores in Southern California, were removing items from shelves, said Terry O'Neill, the chains' spokesman. The stores don't carry all items on the list, and O'Neill couldn't say which ones were pulled.

"The recall is so vast," he said.

The products are being immediately removed from shelves based on notification from the manufacturer or the grocery chain's parent company, Cincinnati-based Kroger Co., and being destroyed or held for return, he said

O'Neill said all customers will be reimbursed for products that are on the list or that they are worried may be affected.

On Wednesday, three restaurants were removed from the list of retailers in the state -- which grew from 5,000 to 7,900 in the past three weeks. But some distributors turned over names of all their customers, so the state's list included some stores and restaurants that never received recalled meat.

In all, six restaurants have been deleted from the list: P.H. Wood's Brewery in Moreno Valley, the Yellow Basket restaurants in Temecula and Santa Ana, and three others in Orange County.

P.H. Wood's received a small amount of the meat from supplier American Meats in 2002. It was probably a sample, said Scott Diehl, the brewery's general manager and part owner.

A couple of customers notified him that he was on the list, and it took about a week to get the documentation, mostly letters from his suppliers of six years, to prove he wasn't receiving meat from Westland/Hallmark, Diehl said.

"The frustrating thing is having that bad name of being on the list," he said. "It looks like (the distributor) gave a blanket list."

Reach Janet Zimmerman at 951-368-9586 or [email protected]


http://www.pe.com/localnews/sbcounty/stories/PE_News_Local_D_recall20.3cf1153.html


QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS HALLMARK/WESTLAND MEAT PACKING CO.

March 6, 2008

Consumer Concerns

Q. My child/school recently consumed Hallmark/Westland products. What is the
risk to children's health?


SEE FULL TEXT ;


http://downercattle.blogspot.com/2008/03/usda-questions-and-answers.html



March 16, 2008


MAD COW DISEASE terminology UK c-BSE (typical), atypical BSE H or L, and or
Italian L-BASE

http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2008/03/mad-cow-disease-terminology-uk-c-bse.html



TSS
 

flounder

Well-known member
We also disagree with APHIS/FSIS’ contention that because they have tested over 375,000 of their 446,000 estimate of high risk cattle, few in the high-risk population are being missed, including those that might be pre-screened before entering a slaughter facility’s property. In our prior audit, we reported that APHIS underestimated the high-risk population;


*** we found that this estimate should have been closer to 1 million animals (see Finding 1).


snip...


The policy stated in the preamble to 9 CFR 309.2(b)104 states that FSIS has excluded all nonambulatory disabled cattle from the human food supply, regardless of the reason for their nonambulatory status or the time at which they became nonambulatory (emphasis added). If an animal becomes nonambulatory in route to the establishment due to an acute injury, it must be humanely removed from the truck, humanely euthanized, and the carcass properly disposed of. Likewise, cattle that become nonambulatory on the establishment premises, such as an animal that breaks its leg as it is unloaded from the truck, are also required to be humanely moved, humanely euthanized, and the carcass disposed of properly. However, an FSIS notice105 states that if cattle are ambulatory at ante mortem inspection and become nonambulatory disabled prior to slaughter, the VMO should verify that the animal suffered an acute injury and allow the animal to proceed to slaughter and post mortem inspection. FSIS would expect such situations to be extremely rare because cattle, when handled and moved under proper humane handling conditions, should not be injured while being moved in pens. For cattle that become nonambulatory disabled after ante

mortem inspection, if the VMO cannot determine that a specific, acute injury occurred that caused the animal to become nonambulatory disabled, the animal is to be condemned and cannot enter the slaughter establishment. There appears to be inconsistent USDA policies related to slaughtering downers/nonambulatory cattle. Regarding animals for slaughter, it is clear that downers will not be slaughtered. In fact, one report106 states: “The U.S. Policy is to condemn all cattle that are nonambulatory or disabled when presented for slaughter." The Department has widely publicized that one of the firewalls put in place to prevent the spread of BSE is the prevention of downers from entering the food supply. Our review at the 12 plants visited showed the following variations in application of the policy for condemning or passing nonambulatory cattle for slaughter.

This was the only documentation of the condition of the cattle available at the plants. Plant inspection personnel believed that FSIS Notice 5-04 allowed the slaughter of nonambulatory cattle if the cattle had passed ante mortem inspection and then went down as the result of an acute injury. Therefore, they had allowed the plant to slaughter these cattle for human consumption. We observed use of a forklift and a rail above the pens to transport nonambulatory cattle to the slaughter area.

snip...see full text 130 pages ;



http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/50601-10-KC.pdf


Recalled beef from Chino slaughterhouse was used in 466 food products

http://downercattle.blogspot.com/2008/03/recalled-beef-from-chino-slaughterhouse.html


TSS
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., will introduce a bill this month to ban the slaughter of all non-ambulatory animals and shut down slaughter facilities that repeatedly violate the rules. Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, a co-sponsor of the bill, has sought a ban since 1992. "Animals that are sick or too weak to stand or walk on their own should not be slaughtered and used for food," Feinstein said Monday in a statement.

The AMI, the meat industry's leading trade group, opposes a ban.

Millions of pounds of wholesome meat would be lost if animals with any injury couldn't be slaughtered, it says.

The AMI estimates the number of non-ambulatory cattle affected by a ban may be as few as 25,000 a year, mostly dairy cows at the end of their milk-producing lives.

Animal-rights activists counter that a ban would increase food safety and shorten the suffering of disabled animals.

"If crippled animals cannot be sold for food, slaughter plants have no reason to prolong their misery to try to get them through the slaughter process," Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, recently told a congressional committee.

Downer cattle are especially troublesome, Pacelle says. They not only carry a risk of mad cow disease, but they are hard to move humanely because they're so big.

Pacelle says the USDA regulation allowing some non-ambulatory cattle to be slaughtered provides financial incentives to slaughter cattle that shouldn't be.

Dairy farmers, who provided many of the cattle to the now-closed Westland/Hallmark, may get a few hundred dollars for a sick cow taken to slaughter vs. paying to have it removed if euthanized on the farm. Slaughterhouses may then seek to recoup costs by slaughtering unfit animals, he says.

The financial toll of slaughtering just a few unfit animals can be huge. Westland/Hallmark isn't expected to reopen given the huge costs of recalling two years of its production. The beef wasn't recalled because of inhumane handling, but because the USDA found evidence that the plant improperly slaughtered some non-ambulatory animals. That raised what USDA officials called a very remote prospect that mad-cow-infected beef got into the food supply.

Redirecting inspectors

Like the AMI, the USDA has said that what occurred at Westland/Hallmark was an isolated case. Still, it has directed inspectors to spend more time the next six weeks checking humane-handling practices.

Jones says the USDA devotes less than 2% of its inspection activities to live animals. The rest has to do with review of meat after slaughter. She says the USDA needs more checks to safeguard the well-being of animals.

"They don't see the violations because they don't spend enough time in areas where live animals are being held," Jones says.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in a 2004 report that humane violations are likely under-reported because USDA inspectors miss them. At Westland/Hallmark, the abuses were uncovered by a worker for the Humane Society of the United States, not the five USDA inspectors at the plant daily.

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