11/10/09 – Toxic hamburgers

Eating a hamburger should not be a death-defying experience. Too often it is. E. coli sickens thousands of people annually, including a young dance teacher named Stephanie Smith, who was paralyzed after eating a contaminated hamburger.

Hamburger is no longer a simple patty created by grinding up cuts of beef from one cow. It is a mix of meat and other parts, often from a variety of slaughterhouses around the world. Testing is done in meat-production facilities, but Mr. Moss found troubling instances when slaughterhouses refused to sell their meat to producers or companies that wanted to do extra testing for the particularly dangerous E. coli that paralyzed Ms. Smith.

Costco, for example, routinely tests hamburger and other foods as they come into their plant and before they are mixed with products from other suppliers. As a result some hamburger producers refused to sell to Costco for fear it would start a major recall.

More companies should follow the best practices used by Costco and others. In the meantime, it should be illegal to discourage such additional safety precautions.

Already too much of the burden for food safety falls on consumers who are advised to cook hamburgers into shoe leather to kill off any dangerous germs. But even that is not enough because it is too easy for raw ground beef to leave behind toxic traces in the kitchen.  Consumers should not have to fear that their hamburger comes with a trip to the nearest emergency room.

Refer to article:

The burger that shattered her life