Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz is on the hot seat for the
way the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has handled food-safety issues at XL
Foods Inc. where a recall because of E. coli 0157:H7 continues to expand.
The United States Food Safety and Inspection Service, it
turns out, was the first to identify beef from the plant that was contaminated
with E. coli 1057:H7, a form of E. coli that produces poisons that can severely
sicken people and lead to death or kidney failure for those too weak to fight
off the poison.
It’s the same strain of E. coli that contaminated drinking
water at Walkerton.
Even though U.S. border officials identified the
contamination on Sept. 3, it took the CFIA more than a week to issue a recall
and then it was limited mainly to Safeway stores in Western Canada.
Now the recall extends to 30 states across the U.S., from
coast to coast in Canada and involves all four of Canada’s largest supermarket
chains.
XL Foods runs Lakeside Packers near Calgary, which is the
second-largest beef-slaughtering plant in Canada.
In the House of Commons, Ritz was blasted for cutting
budgets and staff at the CFIA.
He also took a beating for saying earlier this week that the
CFIA is doing “an exemplary job”, that none of the XL beef reached consumers in
the U.S. and that nobody got sick.
In fact, the U.S. recall now includes many retail outlets,
including Walmart, and in fact at least four people are in hospital in Calgary
suffering food poisoning from the E. coli strain that genetically matches what
has been identified in XL beef.
The U.S. has banned beef from XL from entering the country.
After the outbreak, the CFIA examined the company’s records
and sanitation and has identified deficiencies.
Ritz said there are 48 CFIA inspectors at the facility.
It’s not clear how all of those inspectors missed the
deficiencies that were identified after E. coli turned up in the company’s
products.
So far there has been no comment from any farm
organizations, although the recall is prompting many Canadians to stop buying
ground beef.
