Quotable Quotes:

The answer to recent E. coli outbreaks and other food-borne illnesses has been sitting on the shelf for decades while hundreds of thousands of Americans have been sickened and thousands have died. INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY; Editorial

"If the spinach that contained E. coli in the outbreak in September and October had been irradiated, there would not have been 199 cases of illness, 102 hospitalizations and three deaths." Dennis Olson PhD; Iowa State University

Such nations as India, Mexico and Thailand are starting to irradiate the food they export to the U.S., which means that produce from abroad could be safer than that grown here. Wall Street Journal Editorial

We asked several leading health scientists whether food irradiation could have prevented the E. coli outbreak at Taco Bell restaurants. "Almost certainly, yes."  Dennis Olson, Professor, Iowa State University

In This Update:

E. coli outbreaks prompt leaders to back irradiation

E. Coli's Enablers

Lettuce Irradiate

Spinach Making the Experts turn Green with Anger

Prof: Technology Exists to Kill E. coli

Food Irradiation Would Prevent Sickness Outbreaks

Pakistan's First Irradiation Facility to Open February 2007

Irradiation Back on the Table

Food Irradiation Research and Technology text book now available from IFT & Blackwell Publishing

A rash of food safety incidents have sickened people as close to home as Des Moines and Cedar Falls within the past few weeks rejuvenating the call for safer food handling methods.
 

The story says that the sicknesses were blamed on produce that carried harmful E. coli bacteria, but food safety specialists, regulators and lawmakers say the foods could be made safer if irradiation processes were used on all foods.

Recently, after an outbreak of E. coli that sickened hundreds in the New Jersey area, New York Sen. Charles Schumer called on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to trace produce to its source. Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley was cited as saying rather than spending money to trace E. coli-tainted produce, the government should institute irradiation to kill the bacteria at the source.
 

The FDA has approved irradiation of meat, poultry, fruits, vegetables and spices, claiming that the process is safe and effective in decreasing or eliminating harmful bacteria and pests in food. The term ‘‘irradiation tends to conjure up thoughts in some people who claim the process causes cancer and disease. However, scientists say the irradiation process does not change the taste or nutrient content of foods, rather it extends the shelf life of fresh foods, making foods safer.

http://www.farmnews-iowa.com/News/articles.asp?articleID=5122

The recent E. coli outbreaks are playing as a familiar morality tale of too little regulation. The real story is a much bigger scandal: How special interests have blocked approval of a technology that could sanitize fruits and vegetables and reduce food poisoning in America.

The technology is known as food "irradiation," a process that propels gamma rays into meat, poultry and produce in order to kill most insects and bacteria. It is similar to milk pasteurization, and it's a shame some food marketer didn't call it that from the beginning because its safety and health benefits are well established. The American Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization have all certified that a big reduction in disease could result from irradiating foods.

Says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota: "If even 50% of meat and poultry consumed in the United States were irradiated, the potential impact on foodborne disease would be a reduction in 900,000 cases, and 350 deaths." A 2005 CDC assessment agrees: "Food irradiation is a logical next step to reducing the burden of food borne diseases in the United States."

We asked several leading health scientists whether food irradiation could have prevented the E. coli outbreak at Taco Bell restaurants. "Almost certainly, yes," says Dennis Olson, who runs a research programs on food irradiation at Iowa State University. A recent study by the USDA's Agriculture Research Service confirms that "most of the fresh-cut (minimally processed) fruits and vegetables can tolerate a radiation of 1.0 kGy, a dose that potentially inactivates 99.999% of E. coli."

So what's stopping irradiation? The answer is a combination of political pressure, media scare tactics and bureaucratic and industry timidity. And it starts with organic food groups and such left-wing pressure groups as Public Citizen that have engaged in a fright campaign to persuade Americans that irradiation causes cancer and disease. Something called the Stop Food Irradiation Project tells consumers to tell grocers not to carry irradiated foods.

The liberal-leaning Consumer Reports gave credence to these claims in a 2003 article suggesting that the chemicals formed in meat as a result of irradiation may cause cancer. Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook has served on the Consumer Reports board. Eric Schlosser, author of the best-selling "Fast Food Nation," also disparages irradiation as an "exotic technology" developed "while conducting research for the Star Wars antimissile program." Scary.

None of these mythologies has ever been substantiated by science. The Centers for Disease Control concluded its investigation by noting: "An overwhelming body of scientific evidence demonstrates that irradiation does not harm the nutritional value of food, nor does it make the food unsafe to eat." According to Paisan Loaharanu, a former director at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, "The safety of irradiated foods is well established through many toxicological studies. . . . No other food technology has gone through more safety tests than food irradiation."

The Food and Drug Administration bears some of the blame for bending to political pressure and slowing the spread of food irradiation. The food processing industry requested permission to apply irradiation to enhance the safety of produce in 1999, but seven years later the agency still hasn't approved this "food additive." The FDA does allow irradiation for meat, but it requires warning labels that send a message to consumers that eating such beef or chicken is risky. Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science and Health points out that the FDA would be wiser to require that meats and produce that aren't irradiated have a safety warning label. Those are the potentially unsafe foods.

Somehow this side of the story never seems to make it into the mainstream media. Instead, the press replays the familiar yarn that the E. coli outbreaks are caused by budget cuts and government collusion with industry. In fact, FDA spending on food safety has increased to $535 million in 2006 from $354 million in 2001, a 51% increase.  In any case, such inspections and more regulations can never hope to prevent E. coli as well as irradiation does. The government couldn't possibly hire enough inspectors to track the many sources of fresh produce in the U.S.

Over the past 50 years, the U.S. has reduced by roughly half the death and illness from foodborne disease. Yet 325,000 Americans are still hospitalized and 5,000 die each year from contaminated food. Today only about 1% of our meat and produce is irradiated, though the technology was invented here. Such nations as India, Mexico and Thailand are starting to irradiate most of the food they export to the U.S., which means that produce from abroad could be safer than that grown here. The real scandal of these E. coli outbreaks is that public safety has taken a back seat to political correctness and bureaucratic delay at the FDA.

Public Health: The answer to recent E. coli outbreaks and other food-borne illnesses has been sitting on the shelf for decades while hundreds of thousands of Americans have been sickened and thousands have died. Virtually every modern kitchen has a microwave oven that's used to prepare everything from popcorn to the proverbial TV dinner. We do not fear it; we use it without a second thought. Yet a similar technology that can make food safer is feared and remains relatively unused.

That technology is food irradiation. The U.S. Army pioneered its development in 1943, and it has since been commercially used in more than 40 countries, including on a small scale in the U.S. Astronauts on space shuttle missions have eaten irradiated foods, even steak.

Food irradiation uses gamma rays from a solid radioactive source to break up the DNA of, and thus kill, dangerous bacteria, parasites, mold and fungus in and on agricultural products. It does not make food radioactive, any more than getting a dental X-ray or passing through a metal detector at the airport makes you or your teeth glow in the dark.

The recent deaths traced to contaminated produce served at Taco Bell restaurants is reminiscent of the 1993 deaths of children from tainted beef served at Jack in the Box restaurants. Back in 1997 over 25 million pounds of hamburger was recalled by Hudson Foods in Nebraska after it was discovered to be contaminated with E. coli bacteria. All these incidents could have been prevented by food irradiation.

But when you mention "radiation," Americans think of things like Hiroshima, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Never mind that the process has been deemed safe by the World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association and the Centers for Disease Control.

So-called food-safety advocates warn that irradiation can produce cancer-causing chemicals in foods while depleting them of nutrients. The same fears could be associated with roasting, frying, boiling and broiling, not to mention your backyard barbecue. As the CDC notes: "An overwhelming body of scientific evidence demonstrates that irradiation does not harm the nutritional value of food, nor does it make the foods unsafe to eat."

The CDC feels that if properly done, food irradiation is no more dangerous than the pasteurization of milk or the fluoridation and chlorination of drinking water, advances in technology that have saved countless lives and prevented countless illnesses. As the CDC said in 2005: "Food irradiation is a logical step to reducing the burden of food borne diseases in the United States."

Three decades ago, the WHO declared: "All the toxicological studies carried out on a large number of irradiated foods, from almost every type of food commodity, have produced no evidence of adverse effects" in irradiation.

More recently irradiation was given a clean bill of health by Paisan Loaharanu, a former director at the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, who said: "The safety of irradiated foods is well-established through many toxicological studies. . . . No other food technology has gone through more safety tests than food irradiation."

Despite all the evidence of its safety, only about 1% of our meat and produce is irradiated while 325,000 Americans are hospitalized and 5,000 die each year from food-borne illnesses. How many of those incidents are preventable?

Well, said Dennis Olsen, professor of animal science at Iowa State University, "If the spinach that contained E. coli in the outbreak in September and October had been irradiated, there would not have been 199 cases of illness, 102 hospitalizations and three deaths."

Food for thought.

Spinach that is making the experts turn green with Anger;(December 5, 2006); Destination Sante; Health News Agency:

The alert regarding fresh spinach infected by the E.coli 0157:H7 bacteria which recently affected 26 American States, means the time has come to review the situation. The experts are reminding people of the benefit of irradiating food.

The affair shook North America between mid-August and the beginning of October of this year. In all, 199 people were infected by the E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria after having eaten fresh spinach. Half of them had to be hospitalised. One in eight even suffered from haemolytic uraemic syndrome.

mThe precise contamination mechanism is still being examined”, says Dr Maki at Wisconsin University. mThe bacterial strain in question was detected in fertiliser produced in four neighbouring Californian farms”.

Dr Maki went on to deplore the fact that irradiation of foods is so strongly rejected by certain groups c in particular manti-nuclear activists and other groups” c whereas it is recommended by the WHO, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Atlanta CDC. All of which consider, according to Maki, mthat irradiation of food at risk could prevent over a million infections and 50,000 hospitalisations in North America. The time has therefore come to go beyond irrational fears and to act to protect food safety.

DES MOINES: Dennis Olson could only shake his head when he heard about the recent E. coli outbreak in Iowa and Minnesota. He says the technology exists to easily and inexpensively kill the bacteria long before it reaches consumers.

Olson, a professor of animal science at Iowa State University, is an advocate for irradiation of food to kill harmful bacteria. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has allowed the irradiation of meat since 2000, but does not allow the process for produce.

"It's terrible that we don't have utilization of this very powerful technology. But it's not unlike what we heard a hundred years ago when we started pasteurizing milk," Olson said.

He says irradiation of produce would add just a few cents to the cost and have little, if any, effect on taste.

E. coli was found at a Cedar Falls Taco Johns and at Taco John's locations in southern Minnesota over the last week. Investigators believe the contamination was from green onions that came from a produce supplier for all of the restaurants.

Olson supervises Iowa State's irradiation facility. The concrete box has a 5,000-square-foot footprint, with walls 10 feet thick. Items are placed on a conveyer belt that carries them underneath an electron beam that kills bacteria.

While the Iowa State facility is used mainly for research, a Sioux City company uses the same process for commercial purposes. SADEX Corp. handles ground beef and animal-feed products, but company executives believe there is a market for irradiated produce.

Food-safety experts say outbreaks of E-coli illness among customers of two restaurant chains might have been prevented if the food had been treated with radiation to sterilize it. A business opened to irradiate food in Sioux City went bankrupt in 2004, but has reopened with a new owner.

David Corbin is C-E-O of the Sadex Corporation, which took over the SureBeam plant. Corbin says a couple of factors made them reopen theplant. First, there seem to be more and more well-documented instances of food-borne illness. Second, he says he thinks people's attitudes toward safety have changed since the terrorist attacks of Nine-Eleven. Plus, people are more familiar with the technology and how it's used.

As a matter of fact, he says people are eating tens of millions of pounds of irradiated food a day, and adds with a chuckle, "That food is irradiated by a microwave." Corbin explains microwaves use a form of radiation, and he says it's just a case of educating people about the technology and how it's going to benefit them. He says some products have won acceptance already -- for a long time we've bought seasonings and spices that were irradiated to preserve them.

Producers of premium meat products want to offer their customers quality and also a long "shelf life." He says that's why companies like Schwan's, Omaha Steaks and Colorado Boxed Beef are irradiating their products. Hundreds of people got food poisoning in 1994 from ice cream produced at a Schwan's plant in Minnesota that was traced to non-pasteurized eggs carried in a tanker truck.

The SureBeam plant's been operating again for over a year according to Corbin, who says they have several regional customers.

LAHORE: Pakistans first irradiation plant, a joint venture of Pakistan Horticulture Development and Export Board and Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) will become operational in February next year.

mThe establishment of the facility will greatly boost horticultural exports by helping the exporters meet phyto-sanitary requirements under WTO agreement,” Chairman PHDEB, Saadat Eijaz Qureshi told newsmen. Lack of proper post-harvest technology in Pakistan causes losses to fruit and vegetable production by 30-40 per cent.

Qureshi said the plant would irradiate food items like rice, wheat, cereals, fruits, vegetables and processed food like spices through gamma rays treatment to increase their storage and shelf-life in a most economical manner to fulfill international quarantine requirements such as disinfections and microbial control in horticulture produce.

He said that the project would provide commercial fruit and vegetable irradiation services based on Cobalt 60 gamma radiations to kill the plant pathogens or at least retard the growth of disease-causing bacteria and parasites in food and related items.

Irradiation technology is widely used in scientific as well as commercial applications in the field of agriculture and animal sciences, pharmaceuticals and medical science.

About the safety of this technology, PHDEB Chairman said, three international agencies World Health Organization, Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, and the International Atomic Energy Agency accept the safety and usefulness of food irradiation.

More than 42 countries in the world including developed countries like the US, Canada, UK, France as well as developing countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand have given clearance for irradiation processing of food.

In neighbouring India, the government has also permitted use of irradiation technology in preservation of food items such as potato, onion, rice, wheat atta or maida, mango, resins, dried dates, ginger, garlic, shallots (small onion) and meat products including chicken.

Saadat Eijaz Qureshi said construction work of second irradiation plant would start in Karachi soon after the operationalisation of the plant at Lahore. The construction of Karachis plant would take two years, he added.

Two high-profile E. coli outbreaks this year have some in the food business wondering -- once again -- if it's time to go nuclear.

For decades, many food safety experts have argued that irradiation -- zapping food with high-energy rays to kill microorganisms -- could avert hundreds of deaths and perhaps millions of illnesses each year. But for just as long, federal regulators and food retailers have been leery of bringing the technology to market.

Despite exhaustive reviews by federal scientists and endorsements by public health and medical groups around the world, irradiation by its very name conjures up images that are anything but wholesome: nuclear fallout, for one. That imagery, combined with some lingering uncertainties about irradiation's effects on food, has helped grass-roots activists make a potent case against it.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved irradiation as a disinfectant for a limited range of foods, including spices and ground beef. But a food industry petition to greatly expand that approval to include many ready-to-eat products -- fresh bagged greens, for instance -- has been awaiting review by the agency for more than seven years. Now, with both government officials and the produce industry feeling pressure to respond to the recent outbreaks, irradiation is again up for debate.

Jeff Barach, vice president of the Food Products Association, the trade group that brought the 1999 irradiation petition, said he had for months been unable to get an audience with FDA officials -- until September's outbreak of E. coli in Salinas Valley spinach.

"We all of a sudden got a meeting" with the head of the department that is evaluating the petition, Barach said. He said that he offered to limit the scope of the request to fewer products -- to focus only on fresh packaged vegetables, lunch meats, and a few other items -- in exchange for a quicker decision from the agency. "I think we've made some good progress," he said.

An FDA spokesman said the agency can't comment on the petition's status.

Members of California's fresh greens industry recently have been discussing irradiation -- among other strategies -- in their ongoing negotiations on food safety standards, according to Trevor Suslow, a specialist in perishable produce at the University of California, Davis, who has been present at some of the sessions.

One appeal of irradiation to the produce industry has to do with the difficulty of pinpointing the source of contamination following a foodborne illness outbreak. By the time someone gets sick, there is a good chance the offending bacteria have died off. So, farmers and food processors -- and federal investigators -- can't tell where safeguards failed.

Irradiation introduces the prospect of a final "kill step," for fresh produce, an additional layer of protection if other precautions fail.

The high-energy rays can penetrate packaging, making it possible to do a final disinfection after, say, spinach leaves have been washed and sealed in a bag. The technology can also kill pathogens nestled where disinfectants like chlorine don't always reach: in a crevice in a leaf of spinach, for instance.

Recent studies have shown that the technology will reduce populations of common foodborne disease pathogens by at least 99.9 percent without hurting the quality of most fresh produce, according to Brendan Niemira, a lead scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety Intervention Technologies lab in Pennsylvania.

Irradiation disinfects food by damaging the DNA of microorganisms, rendering them unable to reproduce. The most common irradiation machines employ the high-energy gamma rays produced by radioactive cobalt.

Newer alternatives use X-ray and electron acceleration techniques that do not require radioactive material. Units suitable for mass food processing cost between $4 million and $8 million, according to executives at two U.S. food irradiation firms.

Irradiation was first identified as a food disinfectant in the 1920s. It does not make food radioactive, and its safety is supported by the results of nearly all studies of the technology performed over the past 50 years.

Still, were the irradiation of ready-to-eat produce to be approved, it would likely be the target of fierce campaigning by some public-advocacy groups.

"I would characterize our view on irradiation as calling for a moratorium," said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety in Washington, D.C. In 1999, when the USDA was considering whether to allow irradiation and genetic engineering in certified organic foods, Kimbrell's group helped build strong opposition that included 300,000 public comments. The agency decided to keep both technologies out of the production of organic foods.

Kimbrell says that research results don't provide proof of the safety of irradiation. He also argues that its widespread use would lead the food industry to be sloppy in other areas.

Michael Pollan, an influential writer on food and agriculture, raises another objection: If a costly food safety technology like irradiation becomes a standard step in food processing, small producers are likely be hurt more than large ones who are in a better position to absorb major expenses. That's particularly galling, Pollan says, since the national-scale outbreaks of foodborne illness that tend to prompt the use of such technologies are usually linked to big operations.

The average grocery shopper doesn't have much of an opinion one way or the other about irradiation, said Christine Bruhn, a cooperative extension specialist at UC Davis who has studied consumer attitudes toward the technology for more than 20 years. About 15 percent know about the technology and support it, while 10 percent express strong opposition, she said.

While the recent E. coli episodes have again prompted discussion of wider use of irradiation, a major change isn't likely unless the produce industry's troubles continue, she said. "I suspect it's going to take a few more outbreaks," she said.