Turkey recall prompts calls for better response to outbreaks

Food safety advocates are calling for the federal government to improve its response to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses after it took 13 days to ask a major meat processor to recall ground turkey contaminated with an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella.

In a conference call Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that by July 21 they had connected most of the dots linking the salmonella outbreak to a turkey grinding plant in Springdale, Ark. However, they didn't contact lawyers from the company with their findings until July 29. The outbreak sickened 77 people and killed one between March 9 and July 2.

Meat company Cargill announced the recall of almost 36million pounds of frozen and fresh ground turkey Wednesday evening. It is one of the largest recalls in USDA history and the largest involving meat.

"They had evidence linking the company to several of the illnesses that went back weeks and possibly months," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The government had information that it should have shared with Cargill earlier "so that they could take action to remove potentially contaminated products from the market."

USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service first traced the contamination to "two of the cases in the same state, on the 18th of July, and within two and three days respectively were able to confirm" that the purchases originated in Cargill's plant, David Goldman, an assistant administrator in USDA's Office of Public Health Science, said Thursday.

"We can only react to the information we receive, and did so as soon as we had it," says Mike Martin, Cargill's director of communications.

Data collected as far back as April by a federal program that tests for antibiotic resistance in meat found ground turkey containing the outbreak strain of salmonella. But because the program isn't meant for meat safety surveillance and because several of the people who had gotten sick said they hadn't eaten turkey, "we were finding dissonant types of information that I think prevented us from acting at that point," says the CDC's Christopher Braden, director of the division of food-borne, waterborne and environmental diseases.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., argues that should have gone a lot faster. In a letter sent to the heads of USDA and the CDC on Thursday, she said, "Why was there enough data to warrant the USDA's public health alert on July 29 and yet no additional public information or formal recall until the evening of August 3?"

Cargill has suspended production at the plant "until we can determine the source" of the contamination and take corrective action, Steve Willardsen, president of Cargill's turkey processing business, said in a news release.