A major outbreak of E. coli in romaine lettuce is bringing new attention to the importance of tracking how food gets contaminated.
One person has died and at least 121 have become sick from the outbreak. Federal health officials are scrambling to learn what caused the outbreak, and their inability to figure it out has shed light on the problems they have tracking contamination in the food supply chain.
The outbreak started when lettuce contaminated with E. coli sickened inmates in an Alaska prison. The strain of the bacteria found in the lettuce is more likely to cause severe illnesses than other strains, including kidney failure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Right now, we are looking at multiple distribution channels that could explain the nationwide outbreak and have narrowed it down to about two dozen farms from thousands of records,” said Food and Drug Administration spokesman Peter Cassell.
The agency identified a farm in Yuma, Ariz., as the source of the romaine lettuce that sickened the prisoners. However, it hasn’t determined where in the supply chain the lettuce became contaminated: It could have been contaminated at any point while it was harvested, packaged or distributed.
The federal government is warning consumers to not eat romaine lettuce unless they are absolutely sure that it isn’t from Yuma.
Foodborne illnesses are a major public health threat; roughly 48 million people get sick and 3,000 people die from a foodborne illness every year, according to the CDC.
Food safety regulation is divided between different federal agencies. The FDA oversees the safety of produce, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees meat and poultry.
A 2010 law called the Food Safety Modernization Act overhauled food safety regulations, after a massive outbreak of E. coli in spinach caused three deaths and sickened more than 200 people in 2006.
The FDA established new regulations for harvesting, growing, packing and holding fruits and vegetables. But the regulations, which had staggered deadlines, have not been fully implemented, as only large farms started complying with some regulations at the beginning of this year.
One expert said the inability to detect the cause of contamination represents a flaw in a food safety program.
“I don’t know why it is so hard, but none of this stuff has identifying labeling or some sort of a system that allows easy trace back,” said Sandra Eskin, director of the Food Safety Project for Pew Charitable Trusts.
She said Congress does not need to give the FDA more authority to install a better tracking system for produce. Instead, the outbreak could be a “wakeup call,” especially in light of new technology such as blockchain, which is used by cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin to keep track of transactions. The blockchain creates transaction records similar to a ledger but can be protected against data manipulation.
Another option is to require a QR code, which would include information about where the produce came from, on packaging. The code can be scanned by a smartphone.
“At the very least, you would have the date and place where it was bagged, which would be a huge leg up in this case,” said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports.
Cassell said the FDA has not made a decision on whether to speed up implementation of the food safety law’s regulations since a cause has not been determined. He added that the FDA always does a followup report after an outbreak.
But Halloran is concerned that not all of the regulations from the 2010 law have been phased in. Chief among them is a rule that will impose the first federal standard on the water used in growing and washing produce.
“It is so important because the water can be the vehicle for carrying disease causing organisms,” Halloran said.
She added that runoff of contaminated water from a nearby farm likely caused the 2006 spinach outbreak.
The water rule has not been finalized by the FDA.
The produce industry has called for caution since the cause hasn’t been found.
“Even before the Produce Safety Rule went into effect for large growers this past January, the industry voluntarily implemented food safety measures that often exceed current government requirements,” said Jennifer McEntire, vice president of food safety for the United Fresh Produce Association. “In the absence of any information from FDA about the factors that resulted in this outbreak, it’s impossible to say if any changes to FSMA regulations are warranted.”
