000324 Call For Better Monitoring Of School Lunch Outbreaks

Washington - USDA needs to do a better job of tracking illness-causing contamination in meat, vegetables and milk it donates to subsidized school lunch and breakfast programs across America, a congressional report said.

Although few outbreaks of foodborne illness have been linked to the federal program to feed schoolchildren, the USDA also should provide more safety guidance to schools purchasing food with federal money, the General Accounting Office (GAO) said in the report.

Outbreaks of foodborne illness linked to subsidized school lunches in 1997 and 1998 sickened an estimated 1,609 children and teachers, the report said. Other outbreaks in US schools have been caused by food brought from home or purchased in nearby restaurants.

USDA spends about $7 billion annually to provide food or funding for more than 33 million lunches and breakfasts served daily to American schoolchildren.

The majority of food served in the federal program is purchased by local schools with USDA funding, with the remainder donated directly to schools by USDA in the form of beef, poultry, fruits, vegetables, grain and milk.

In 1997, the latest year for which nationwide data is available, eight outbreaks of foodborne illness were linked to federally subsidized school lunches, the report said. Nationwide data was not available for 1998, but the state health department records indicate nine outbreaks were reported that year.

“This report recommends that the Secretary of Agriculture expeditiously develop a database for continuously documenting all food safety actions taken on foods donated to the department's food assistance programs,” the report said. The USDA should also give schools more help in developing food purchasing contracts that require higher levels of food safety, it said.

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who requested the study, said he asked Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman to immediately adopt the recommendations. “I don't think we have a crisis, but we have areas in clear need of improvement,” Harkin said. “There are unacceptably large gaps in our knowledge about whether we are doing all we can to ensure the safety of 33 million meals eaten every day by our nation's children.”

The USDA said it believed the most significant threat to food safety in schools involved proper storage, handling and serving. The department has developed food safety training kits materials and is working with a newly-formed federal food safety coalition to develop educational programs.

In 1997 and 1998, the USDA pulled some 1.7 million pounds of strawberries, 400,000 pounds of poultry and an unknown quantity of ground beef from school lunch programs because of suspected foodborne illness, the GAO said.

Nationwide, an estimated 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths are caused by contaminated food each year, according to a new tracking system developed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

E-mail: sflanagan@sprintmail.com