“I’m not complaining,” Heersink said recently in a telephone interview. “This child is alive.”

Bacteria From Cattle

Agricultural researchers say they believe that about 3 percent of dairy calves in the United States are infected with ECO157, which does not make the animals sick. The microbe also has been isolated in beef herds. It is unknown why some animals are more likely to harbor the bacterium than others. Some animals that test positive for the bacterium soon afterward test negative, and vice versa.

Initially, cattle herds along the Canadian border were identified as the primary carriers of ECO157. But Mike Doyle, a professor of food microbiology at the University of Georgia, has isolated the bacterium in raw milk from cows in Georgia, and a large-scale survey of cows in Florida and Tennessee also turned up positive test results, Doyle said. In 1993, ECO157 outbreaks occurred in such disparate places as Texas, Maine, Pennsylvania and New Mexico.

The relatively small percentage of infected animals does not reflect the extent to which the bacteria can contaminate meat during slaughtering and grinding.

Splattered with mud and manure, cattle often arrive at a plant looking as if they should be headed for a car wash instead. They are stunned between the eyes, either through electrical shocks or a stun gun, and hoisted upside down by the back hooves. Their carotid arteries are cut, draining most of the blood.

Then the hide is removed. During that procedure, ECO157-infected fecal material from the dirty hide may come in contact with the flesh underneath, or residual feces near the anus may spill onto the carcass, particularly if the opening to the large intestine has not been tied off. Some plants remove hides by machine, although the equipment is not designed to prevent contamination.

The body cavity is then opened, and the animal is eviscerated by a meat packer, another potentially risky step. The viscera, which include the stomachs and intestines, are contained in a large membrane; together, the organs can weigh a couple of hundred pounds. If the removal is not done carefully, or if the conveyor lines are running too quickly, the membrane may be punctured by the packer’s knife, spewing intestinal bacteria all over — including onto the carcass. When this happens, the lines are supposed to be stopped and the mess cleaned up, but the contamination already may have taken place.

The carcass is then split in half with a saw, trimmed and sent to the cooler and later broken down into smaller cuts. If the flesh is used in ground beef, meat from infected animals can mix with meat from other carcasses, and one diseased cow can infect thousands of future hamburger patties.

What is also disturbing about ECO157 is that it appears to survive in acidic environments — including apple cider, mayonnaise and yogurt — that are hostile or even fatal to most other foodborne bacteria. Moreover, organic acid sprays that destroy salmonella and other pathogens on carcasses do not kill ECO157. The bacterium has, said Doyle, “a unique resistance.”

Victim Support Groups

While researchers study the microbe, parents of victims have formed ECO157 support groups, foundations and educational organizations around the country. There are chapters of Safe Tables Our Priority (S.T.O.P.) in California, Alabama, Florida, Utah and New Jersey, with plans for expansion nationwide. Parents are lobbying Congress and the Agriculture Department. Mothers such as Heersink, who never imagined themselves as activists, have testified on Capitol Hill, set up toll-free hotlines and become politically savvy.

Trade groups that seem like odd couples, such as the meat industry and the medical profession, are meeting to discuss possible solutions. Cattlemen and meat companies, who have much to lose from another outbreak, are funding research projects.

The American Meat Institute donated $25,000 to the Lois Joy Galler Foundation for Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome at a briefing held last month in New York. The foundation, the nation’s only medical research organization for HUS, was established by Robert and Laurie Galler in 1992 after their 3-year-old daughter, Lois Joy, died from eating contaminated beef prepared at their Long Island home.

Congress is paying increased attention to meat inspection. To many in Congress, “meat and poultry inspection was an arcane subject that 99 percent of members knew nothing about,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary in the Carter administration. Now members “are waking up,” she said, to the idea that there may be a conflict of interest in letting USDA — an agency whose mandate is to increase agricultural production and promote the sale of farm goods — also oversee the safety of the meat supply.

So far, at least three bills have been introduced that would remove meat and poultry inspection from the USDA. Vice President Gore has called for transferring those duties to the Food and Drug Administration as part of his “Reinventing Government” plan.

The USDA, for its part, has pledged to modernize an antiquated system that was not designed to detect and eradicate invisible pathogens such as ECO157. But critics, even those who say Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy has all the right intentions, believe the pace of improvements has been far too slow.

“Slaughter practices are not improving,” said Kathi Allen, of Redmond, Wash., one of the founders of the Foundation to Eliminate E. Coli Outbreaks, a victim support group. “I could really scream.”

Espy announced last month at the Galler Foundation briefing that the USDA is conducting 1,000 unannounced visits of slaughter plants to make sure they are in compliance with regulations. The department is also involved in numerous other efforts, and President Clinton’s fiscal 1995 budget proposes an increase of $33.3 million to improve meat and poultry inspections.

Seeking a Solution

It is not surprising that, with so many voices in the debate, there are many opinions about what to do about ECO157, and fingers are being pointed in many directions. But one thing is clear: Everyone, from cattlemen to grieved parents to government bureaucrats, agrees that ECO157 is a complex problem that will not go away. Most also agree that no single approach will work, and that hurdles against ECO157 must be erected all along the way from the farm to the table.

Activists such as Heersink believe that the USDA needs to be motivated far more by public health concerns than by meat-industry needs, that rapid conveyor-line speeds in slaughter plants need to be slowed down and that the department needs to enforce consistently its “zero tolerance” regulation that prohibits any fecal material on carcasses after animals are slaughtered.

But trimming may not solve the problem, as there is no way to determine whether all the fecal material has been removed, if there are invisible particles still imbedded in an animal’s flesh or if the bacteria have been spread by a contaminated trimming knife, meat industry officials say.

Last year, USDA researchers in Nebraska developed a rapid test to detect the presence of microbiological contamination on carcasses, and they are getting ready to test it at a commercial slaughter operation. Still, the test cannot detect specific bacteria, and it picks up only gross contamination, not the minute specks of ECO157 that can cause infection.

Heersink agrees with Doyle of the University of Georgia that the best form of prevention is to keep ECO157 out of slaughter plants in the first place.

To that end, Doyle is trying to develop a vaccine that would immunize young animals against carrying the bacteria. Research also is being conducted to figure out where and how ECO157 colonizes the animal.

The cattle and meat industries are financing studies on irradiation of beef to kill ECO157. But the technique’s future is uncertain: Fear of negative public reaction to irradiated foods so far has kept companies from introducing irradiated poultry products.

Meanwhile, there is no way to determine whether the meat supply is safer than it was a year ago, and the best defense against ECO157 infections is still to cook ground meat thoroughly.

“You can choose to cook your food to the point where the juices no longer run pink and the meat is gray,” Cohen of the CDC said. “The problem is that a lot of people don’t like to eat their food that way. People always believe it will happen to someone else — and not to them.”

In the United States, an estimated 20,000 people a year experience an infection of E. coli O157:H7, many without realizing it. Effects can range from bloody diarrhea to kidney failure and death. The microbe, carried in the intestines of animals, most commonly infects humans who eat ground beef that has not been thoroughly cooked. Chart shows data available for selected years.

SOURCE: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reporting this infection is voluntary, and CDC officials say the data may be incomplete.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/02/13/a-disease-thats-a-bite-away/19de35db-9dde-45ba-bf74-fc507dfe2525/