Who should pay to make ground beef safe from E. coli?
— -- What if it were possible to almost entirely do away with E. coli in ground beef and it would cost only about a penny a burger?
Food-safety experts say it's entirely feasible with new technologies that have become available. One is a vaccine, the other a feed additive, which, given early enough, could bring down potential E. coli contamination to negligible levels.
The problem, experts in beef safety say, is that the economics are backward. The new interventions have to be administered long before the cattle are slaughtered, when the calves are young or in feed lots where they're growing.
It's hard to figure out who should pay for steps that would take place months and possibly years before the grill starts sizzling. The people who'd have to pay for them aren't the ones who would reap the direct benefits.
Researchers at Harvard University estimate that American beef consumers are willing to pay 1 cent to 2 cents a pound to reduce the risk of E. coli O157:H7 illnesses. "Common sense plus our paper and many others suggest consumers will pay more for safer food," says James Hammitt, who co-wrote a paper on consumer willingness to pay for food safety in the September edition of the journal Risk Analysis.
These interventions aren't perfect, but they're very good, says Guy Loneragan, a professor of food safety at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. "The question is no longer, 'Can we get the technologies?' We've got them, or they're soon to arrive. The question is 'How do we implement?' "
"This is really good news," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, food-safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "This is a huge advance in the war against these pathogenic strains of E. coli."
So far only two small companies appear to be embracing them. One is a tiny feed lot cooperative in Kansas that's looking to vaccinate all its cattle "soon." The other is a Meade, Kan., cooperative that's staking its economic life on calling for retailers nationally to demand these interventions from the packers that supply their meat.
The game may be changing, however. At a meeting earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture started a discussion that might move things along.
The regulatory landscape "is confusing," says Elisabeth Hagen, USDA's undersecretary for food safety. "But we're realizing that there's an issue here and somehow we have to bring everybody together and focus on the end product, the result of which is the safety of the food that goes to the American consumer."
Nancy Donley, whose son died from E. coli O157:H7 in a hamburger, went on to found the non-profit STOP Foodborne Illness.
Consumers are happy to pay for additional safety, Donley says. "We need to do something at the source" before cattle go to slaughter, she says. "This is something we've been crying for for ages."
Taming the E. coli threat
E. coli bacteria live in the guts of most mammals. There are many types of E. coli and almost all are harmless to the animals. Many are beneficial. But a few, including O157:H7, secrete a toxin that doesn't hurt cattle but does hurt and can kill humans if they eat meat contaminated with it.
E. coli doesn't live inside the muscle, so steaks and roasts aren't likely routes of contamination — because if there's E. coli on the outside, it's killed when they're cooked.
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