She Survived Cancer, But the Peanut Butter Killed Her

ABC’s Tom Shine from Washington:

Shirley Mae Almer was 72 years old.  She had cancer and survived it and the extensive radiation treatments that followed.  But it was dirty peanut butter spread on a piece of toast that killed her just days before her family was going to bring her home from a nursing home to celebrate Christmas.

Gabrielle Meunier says her 7 year old son was a perfectly healthy boy until last Thanksgiving night.  Then he began throwing up, developed a very high fever and was in tremendous pain; "a pain that no child should ever have to experience…"  It wasn’t the flu, like Gabrielle and the doctor first thought.  It was salmonella poisoning most likely from the peanut butter crackers he ate.

Today a Senate committee will hear from Gabrielle Meunier, the FDA, the CDC and Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the center for science in the public interest. 

Caroline Smith DeWaal will remind the esteemed members of this congressional committee that "Over the last two years Congress has conducted 17 oversight and legislative hearings on food safety that followed outbreaks caused by spinach tainted with E. coli, peanut butter contaminated with salmonella, canned chili sauce with deadly botulism spores and pet food containing ingredients intentionally adulterated with melamine."
 
In every case, she says, "the hearings revealed flaws both in the food manufacturers processes and in the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight."  She will also point out that the GAO has placed food safety in its high risk category THREE YEARS IN A ROW." She says the time for reform is now and adds many elements of a reform plan are "shovel ready".  "Let’s begin and let’s get it right."