The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has posted its final
report on how it is responding to the report by Sheila Weatherill on the
Listeria monocytogenes in meats from Maple Leaf Foods Inc. that killed 23
Canadians in the summer of 2008.
One major thing that remains to be done is introduction of a
bill to “modernize and simplify” food safety laws.
That is something that top-echelon staff have been
recommending since the mid-1970s when they told me that food safety ought to be the
responsibility of the meat-packing companies, not government inspectors.
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| Cartoon courtesy Dr. Doug Powell |
They said then that it would be better to sample and test products pulled from retail shelves and if any problems were identified, the company would have to recall everything. They said that would get a clear message to the meat packers to smarten up.
They also recommended surprise audits of packing plants and shut-downs if they failed to meet standards.
That, they told me then, would put meats on the same footing as other food products, such as breakfast cereals.
At the time of the Maple Leaf crisis, federal-government
meat inspectors were still in the packing plants, looking over the shoulders of
staff and failing to notice that the deadly bacteria was contaminating
products.
The company also failed to track down the source of
contamination after Listeria monocytogenes began showing up in “environmental
samples” taken in the plant at Barton Road in Toronto.
It wasn’t until after massive product recalls, a complete
shut-down of the plant and repeated sanitation efforts that the company said it
had found the source inside meat-slicing equipment.
·
In its response to Weatherill’s report, filed in
July, 2009, the government says it now is:
- · Identifying and fast-tracking the approval of food safety interventions such as food additives that reduce the growth of Listeria monocytogenes and other pathogens.
- · Hiring 170 additional full-time inspectors to increase CFIA’s presence in federally registered meat processing plants.
- · Developing new detection methods for Listeria and other hazards in food that reduce testing time and enable more rapid response during food safety investigations.
- · Using innovative laboratory technologies in outbreak investigations and expanding the outbreak detection lab network to include public health and food safety partners across Canada.
- · Supporting national public health surveillance to improve collection, reporting and analysis of a wide range of health information.
- · Providing Canadians, including those most vulnerable, with the information they need to reduce the risk of a foodborne illness through a new online food safety portal and national public information campaigns.
- · Updating the Foodborne Illness Outbreak Response Protocol, which guides how all levels of government work together to respond to a national or international outbreak.
- · Ensuring that health risk assessment teams are available 24/7 to support food safety investigations.
- · Building surge capacity in order to respond more quickly and effectively to potential future foodborne illness outbreaks.
The government report says it now has a “heightened
awareness of the significance of food safety and it is a high priority at all
levels of government.”
It says Health Canada has undertaken a
comprehensive review of its Listeria monocytogenes policy and the government
now has tests to identify the harmful bacteria more quickly.
It says there is improved sharing of
information among bureaucracies involved in food safety, such as the Public
Health Agency with headquarters in Winnipeg, Health Canada in Ottawa and the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency offices across Canada.
There is a Special Committee of Deputy
Heads to oversee implementation of Weatherill’s report.
Food companies are now required to do more
in-plant environmental sampling and testing and more product sampling and
testing.
Government inspectors have been granted
more flexibility to check hunches about food-safety issues. They have also been
retrained and new inspectors’ training now involves 29 modules and both
classroom and on-the-job training.
The Foodborne Illness Outbreak Response
Protocol has been overhauled.
The report identifies several announcements
of increasing funding for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, but it’s not
clear what the real total has been. It says $489.5 million, spread over five
years, was announced in 2008, $75
million in September, 2009, $13 million per year for two years in 2010 and $100
million over five years in $2011.
The union representing meat inspectors
cites a promise to hire 170 additional inspectors and says that promise is
temporary and likely to disappear in the upcoming fiscal budgets because they
are lower than for 2011-12.
As for food additives, the report says
Sodium Acetate and Sodium Diacetate were approved for use in processed meat and
poultry products in 2008 and in December, 2010, Carnobacterium maltaromatium
was approved as an additive effective against Listeria.
The report also says there has been
increased checking to determine whether the food-safety standards are being
met. The Compliance Verification System review was completed by October, 2010,
the report says, but does not indicate what was found.
It all sounds so wonderful, eh? I think most of it is a crock of bureaucratic balderdash. Nothing much happened in the mid-1970s after I reported on major faults in Canadian meat-packing plants, other than similar bureaucratic balderdash.
And I only have to look at the egg industry to make my point. We have a whistleblower's account, detailed in documents filed in court, claiming that about five per cent of the Grade A eggs sold by one of the largest egg-grading companies in Canada are cracked.
Those cracked eggs go through manure-polluted wash water, so there is a very real possibility that thousands of cracked eggs are carrying harmful bacteria right through the system into kitchens, including the kitchens of hospitals, nursing homes and day-care centres where some of the most vulnerable Canadians have their meals prepared.
I have yet to see so much as a single statement - even a single sentence - from the federal government about its response to the court documents and the food risks involved.
