020809 Scientists Have Beef With Meat Tests

Rocky Mountain News - The price of ground beef would double if the meat industry did all the tests needed to reach 99% certainty that a pack of raw hamburger doesn't contain dangerous bacteria, industry scientists said.

"I challenge you to find any raw food product - eggs, celery, milk, meat - that doesn't have potentially pathogenic bacteria," said Dr. Randall Huffman of the American Meat Institute. "It doesn't exist."

Huffman was responding to questions springing from this summer's E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak, which has been traced to the ConAgra Beef plant in Greeley and which has sickened 30 people nationwide, including 20 Coloradans.

ConAgra Beef recalled 19 million pounds of ground beef, but hasn't ruled out reusing some of the contaminated meat. Some may be cooked and packaged in ready-to-eat containers of chili or bologna.

Consumers shouldn't worry, industry scientists said.

Compared with the inherent uncertainty of raw food - and the limits of testing - the ready-to-eat, precooked foods are far less likely to contain dangerous bacteria, Huffman said. That's true whether the raw food is meat, celery or milk.

Cooked thoroughly, meat testing positive for E. coli is safer than the vast majority of meat that was never tested, officials say.

Here's why:

Under current U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, one test for E. coli is conducted for every 10,000 pounds of meat.

About 1% of the time, a test comes back positive, and that hunk of meat is deemed unfit for raw-meat sales.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, the test comes back negative, which means that the 1-pound sample didn't contain the bacteria. But could it be hiding somewhere else in the 5-ton heap?

To be 99% sure that the answer is "no" would require testing 460 1-pound chunks, randomly selected, Huffman said.

At $20 a test, that would cost $9,200 - plus the 460 pounds lost to testing - in a market where meat sells wholesale for less than a dollar a pound.

Taking one sample from the lot "isn't enough to tell us a whole lot about the product," he said.

The chances that one sample assures that the whole lot is safe are "extremely small," he added.

The 99 lots deemed E. coli-free based on a single test may not be that much safer than the one lot rejected.

The public doesn't want to pay $5 a pound for hamburger, and until it does, there isn't going to be a way to "test our way toward safe meat," Huffman said.

That's why the meat industry objects to proposals by consumer groups for more and more testing, he said.

Instead, the industry tries to eliminate the bacteria before the cow is slaughtered, butchered or ground. And it keeps trying to emphasize the importance of cooking ground beef to 160 degrees to kill the bacteria.

U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, who last week introduced a bill to give the USDA stronger enforcement powers on meat inspection, said that recalled meat is tested at a higher standard before it can be recycled.

For example, in order for recycled meat to be processed to taste like bologna, the meat has to be cooked far in excess of the temperature needed to destroy E. coli and other pathogens, Huffman said.

The USDA and the meatpackers run sample tests of the precooked food before it is shipped.

"Scientifically, there's absolutely nothing wrong with cooking that product using the validated process," Huffman said. "The premise that it somehow is an inappropriate practice is just false."

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