 991225 Court Reverses USDA Attempt to Close Texas PlantDecember 10, 1999 Washington - A federal judge has ruled that a Texas plant supplying ground beef to schools across the nation can remain open, after the USDA tried to close the plant for failing food safety tests. The lawsuit is a major test case of USDA's revamped inspection program that requires virtually all U.S. processing plants to routinely test meat for illness-causing salmonella. Supreme Beef Processing Inc., a privately-owned plant in Dallas, won the right to keep its doors open after U.S. Judge Joe Fish ordered federal meat inspectors to return to the plant. The court ruling was issued on Tuesday but did not become widely known until Friday. Under federal law, meat cannot be sold across state lines unless it is federally inspected. Sources close to the department said USDA lawyers were trying to persuade the judge to halt a Supreme Beef shipment of ground beef due to be delivered to the federally-subsidized school lunch program in the next few days. Salmonella can cause diarrhea and cramps in healthy adults, and can be deadly for young children, the elderly, cancer patients or others with weak immune systems. USDA officials refused to comment on any aspect of the case, or company meat sales for the school lunch program. Government documents, however, showed Supreme Beef last month won a contract to sell 316,800 pounds of ground beef to the school program. In fiscal 1997, the latest year for which data is available, the firm ranked as USDA's second- biggest supplier of ground beef, selling $16.7 million worth. The plant buys boneless meat, and grinds it into about 500,000 pounds of raw ground beef daily. The ruling alarmed consumer activists, who have pressed the government to adopt stricter standards to make food safer. “This temporary restraining order is clearly a major setback for food safety. Plants that consistently fail microbial test results should not be allowed to operate,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, a food safety expert with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. But the firm said in court filings that the salmonella tests were unfair, and the USDA should not be able to pull its inspectors out of a plant as punishment for failing the tests. Some industry officials contend that processing plants have little control over salmonella because they are handling meat that has already been inspected by the USDA at the slaughterhouse. Efforts to reduce salmonella should be directed at the farm and slaughterhouse level, they say. “It isn't a question of is the meat safe or unsafe,” said Rosemary Mucklow, head of the National Meat Association. “It's rather a question of how do we effectively work to reduce this microorganism. Nothing that Supreme Beef can do in its grinding plant is going to change that.” Tests showed Supreme Beef produced meat in October with more salmonella in three sets of samples than allowed by the USDA, according to court documents. The company said it was working with the USDA to try and resolve the problems when the government suspended its inspections on Tuesday. James Bowen, an attorney for Supreme Beef, said the court issued a temporary restraining order within hours of the USDA action, forcing inspectors to return to work. A court hearing is set for Dec. 10 to determine if the plant can remain open. “Because ... salmonella is destroyed during normal cooking, the presence of salmonella is not a public safety issue,” the company said in a court filing. During the past two years, the USDA has rewritten federal meat inspection programs to force meat and poultry plants to take more responsibility for preventing and detecting microscopic foodborne bugs along the production line. The new regime, known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, requires plants to set up a series of scientific checkpoints to monitor the safety of their products. USDA inspectors review those checkpoints along with the salmonella tests to make sure plants operate safely. The program has been widely endorsed by meat industry groups and consumer activists as a more effective way to prevent foodborne disease than the traditional “poke and sniff” method used by USDA inspectors. It also requires a plant to test three sets of product for salmonella, each containing 53 samples. If more than 5 samples in each set are tainted, the plant faces USDA sanctions. Supreme Beef complained that the USDA test rules unfairly permit a higher amount of salmonella in ground turkey. “The truth is that nobody really knows what the safe limit is for salmonella in food,” said Lester Crawford, a food safety expert at Georgetown University who once headed the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service.
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