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Rick Holley, a food-safety expert at the University of Manitoba, long suspected that the frozen chicken nuggets sold at his local grocery store might be contaminated with salmonella.
So he spent three years testing a variety of brands. His findings: One in four nuggets was tainted. But consumers could avoid salmonella poisoning, which causes diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps, by baking the nuggets at 80C.
Prof. Holley does not know at what point along the journey from chicken coop to dinner plate the bacteria made their way into the nuggets. But in the wake of the deadly outbreak of listeria linked to ready-to-eat meats, he said Canada is ill-equipped to track food-related illnesses. The country lacks the surveillance systems that could lead to better detection of food-borne illnesses, he said, raising questions about whether health authorities are doing all they can to prevent sickness and death.
“We are hamstrung in our inability to identify risk,” he said in an interview. “If we can't identify the risk, we can't manage it. And if we can't manage it, we have no control over what's happening in terms of food-borne illness.”
Professor Rick Holley of the Department of Food Science at the University of Manitoba is photographed with some meat products that have been created with flax and mustard to provide some microbial protection against such things as e-coli and listeria. (John Woods/The Globe and Mail)
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Food-borne bacteria are a fact of life, so it is unrealistic for consumers to expect that everything they eat is safe. But a dearth of warnings in Canada about what products are likely to pose the greatest risk leaves consumers largely in the dark.
Doug Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University, said pregnant women are 20 times more susceptible to contracting listeriosis than members of the general public. Yet they are not warned to avoid deli meats and smoked salmon, two of the foods where the bacteria are commonly found, he said.
Some foods are riskier than others. The dangers of undercooked hamburger or poultry have long been recognized. But the listeriosis crisis is the latest example of problems with ready-to-eat products. Even fresh vegetables are not immune, as the botulism from fresh carrot juice and E. coli in spinach in recent years have shown. And it makes no difference whether the food is locally grown, organic or is shipped hundreds of kilometres from a large, multinational company.
“Organic is a production standard that has nothing to do with food safety,” Prof. Powell said in an interview. “People think it's safer and they think that local is safer, but there is no evidence of that.”
Prof. Powell, a Canadian, questions why health officials here did not do more to warn those who are most vulnerable to listeriosis – the elderly, the sick, the pregnant – about the risks. Among those who have fallen ill with listeriosis, the fatality rate is high. So far, Canada has 29 confirmed cases of listeriosis and 15 deaths. Ontario has been hit hardest, with 22 confirmed cases and 12 deaths. The victims in Ontario ranged in age from 42 to 94, said David Williams, Ontario's chief medical officer of health. All lived in an institution or were hospitalized before becoming ill.
Dr. Williams said in an interview that he expects those tasked with ensuring the safety of the country's food supply to look at whether Canada can do more to protect consumers from tainted food.
“It's a pan-Canadian issue,” he said. “We have our susceptible populations and how do we protect them.” Health Canada published an advisory on listeriosis in 2005, warning high-risk individuals to avoid several foods, including uncooked hot dogs, deli meats, smoked seafood and soft cheeses. But many nursing homes in Ontario and other provinces did not follow the advisory.
Health officials in Ontario began probing the outbreak of listeriosis in July when two residents of a Leisureworld nursing home in Toronto became sick. Further investigation revealed that residents had been served sandwiches made with deli meat from Maple Leaf Foods, the company at the centre of the crisis.
As health officials continue to investigate the outbreak, they are releasing scant information, leaving it unclear whether the worst of the problem is over. Until Friday, when Dr. Williams revealed that most of the fatalities in Ontario occurred in July, no details had been released on when individuals died or when they first became sick.
Prof. Holley said Canadian officials will be just as unprepared for the next food-borne illness because they are not collecting information on what foods are most likely to make consumers sick.
This is in stark contrast to the United States, which takes a much more active approach to addressing food safety. Through a federal program called FoodNet, the U.S. monitors trends in specific food-borne illnesses, a process that involves tracking the health of 15 per cent of the population, or 45 million people. The program, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, allows health officials to collect data on what foods are making a certain percentage of the population sick every year.
Inspectors at the FDA recently traced a salmonella outbreak that left 1,437 people across the United States and five in Canada sick to a pepper farm in Mexico. In a report released this week, the CDC said jalapeno peppers were a major source of contamination and that tomatoes were a possible source.
Prof. Holley said there is nothing comparable to the FoodNet system in Canada.
“We really can't get the overall picture,” he said. “We can't focus on where there is a need for attention.”
