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Canada’s largest-ever recall of beef from the country’s second-largest slaughterhouse has left Canadians wondering how safe their meat is – and why the problems weren’t fixed four years ago after a deadly listeriosis outbreak linked to deli meats killed several people. Here’s a primer on what has happened at the Brooks, Alta.-based XL Foods Inc. plant, and what it means to consumers.

Q. What is E. coli? Is it one strain or many?
A. Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a common bacterium found in the bowels of all warm-blooded mammals. There are many sub-strains but E. coli O157:H7, known to cause so-called “hamburger disease,” is the most known to the public. Another strain is the one that causes traveller’s diarrhea. Most E. coli strains are benign, but the 0157:H7 strain can kill.

Q. Where did the problem at XL Foods start?
A. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency does not know the exact source of the bacteria in this case. But E. coli comes into meat plants either in the manure on the hides of cows, or via the animal’s intestines, where the bacteria reside (the intestines can be nicked when plant employees split the carcass to remove organs). “There’s no rocket science around that,” CFIA senior adviser Brian Evans told Postmedia News.

Q. When did CFIA become aware there was a problem?
A. On Sept. 4, during routine testing, CFIA first detected E. coli 0157:H7 in meat products produced from an Alberta facility supplied by XL Foods. Separately, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported to CFIA the same day a positive sample in beef trimmings from the same XL Foods plant. The U.S. test was carried out on a shipment at the Montana border. Based on those two test results, CFIA concluded that no affected product was in the Canadian retail market, but launched an investigation to determine the source of the contamination.

During the course of its probe, CFIA identified production problems on five days: Aug. 24, 27, 28, 29 and Sept. 5. Specifically, the plant did not have adequate measures in place to monitor higher-than-normal rates of E. coli and modify control measures accordingly. When the agency determined products from these production days were actually in the Canadian marketplace, it announced a national recall of XL Foods ground beef, on Sept. 17. By then, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had shut the border to products manufactured at the XL Foods plant under its “zero tolerance” policy for E. coli 0157:H7.

Since the initial recall of ground beef sold at Costco, Safeway and Walmart in five provinces, the recall has been expanded numerous times to cover more than 1,800 products of various ground beef items, steaks and whole muscle cuts, sold in all provinces and 41 U.S. states. CFIA warns the beef recall, already the largest in Canadian history, could expand further.

Cattle are pictured on the Bell L ranch near Airdrie, Alberta

Q. Where can I keep up-to-date on these recalls?
A. Check inspection.gc.ca for information.

Q. What did CFIA find during their in-depth investigation that its inspectors and veterinarians didn’t see during their regular inspections?
A. The company had procedures in place that required the removal from the assembly line of products if they preceded or followed lots that tested positive for E. coli. This procedure is called bracketing, and the inspection staff at the plant (40 government inspectors and six veterinarians, split between two production shifts) didn’t identify any problems — until they took an in-depth look following a Sept. 4 positive test. That’s when CFIA determined “a small number of containers” were not always diverted from the fresh meat line.
During its in-depth investigation, CFIA also discovered that the company didn’t always follow sampling protocols set up to find E. coli 0157:H7. Nor was it doing “trend analysis,” which could have flagged problems.

Q. What new requirements will CFIA introduce in the wake of XL Foods recall?
A. Richard Arsenault, CFIA’s director of meat inspection, told Postmedia News the agency will establish a firm threshold that will require companies to divert or dispose of beef trimmings if positive test results for E. coli 157: H7 reach a certain percentage on “high event days.” CFIA will also bring in a new rule to require slaughterhouses to analyze test results of beef trimmings so they can “connect the dots” on emerging food-safety problems. In other words, trend analysis.

Q. Why was the plant shut down?
A. CFIA suspended the licence on Sept. 26 after determining that the company did not properly address six Corrective Action Requests (CAR) issued by CFIA during the course of its investigation. A CAR is the primary tool used by CFIA to compel companies to fix problems within a specific time frame. The six CARs are about E. coli prevention controls, plant sanitation and plant maintenance.

Q. If no one has died, is it an over-reaction to take all these products off the market?
A. Experts say no. E. coli 0157:H7 can kill, especially if it strikes vulnerable populations, such as young children and older people.

Q. Are these people more susceptible to E. coli than others?
A. Not precisely. Most people don’t develop disease, but among those who do get sick, the illness is worse in small children and the elderly, according to Dr. Dick Zoutman, a medical microbiologist and infectious disease specialist. Health experts also worry about pregnant women, and about those who take drugs for immune-system disorders. They’re not more likely to get the infection but more at risk for complications if they do get sick.

Q. What are the typical symptoms of an E. coli infection?
A. Watery diarrhea, fever, abdominal pain, bloody diarrhea, nausea, vomiting.

Q. Do cases of E. coli, or deaths from E. coli, go unreported?
A. It’s possible but unlikely because all cases of E. coli O157:H7 must be reported to public-health authorities by the doctors who diagnose them.

Q. What can happen in severe cases?
A. Severe cases can go on to develop kidney damage, or damage to the lining of the blood vessels, including the lining of the blood vessels of the kidneys, because E. coli produces a toxin. Red blood cells may be damaged as they travel down the blood stream and victims can develop hemolytic-uremic syndrome or HUS, which could leave permanent kidney damage, Zoutman says.

Q. How are E. coli infections treated?
A.  Antibiotics are generally not recommended because they make the bacteria produce more toxin, Zoutman says. More often, doctors offer supportive treatment – hydration and painkillers – for complications, if they develop. Those who develop HUS need specialized treatment, such as dialysis or other blood-cleaning techniques. The mortality rate of patients who develop HUS is about 10 per cent but can reach as high as 50% in the elderly.

Q. How can consumers reduce their chances of getting E. coli?
A. First, recalled beef products should not be consumed. But products not subject to the recall can be eaten. “When I buy meat at the grocery store, I know that meat isn’t sterile,” Zoutman says.  “That’s why raw meat is a problem.”
Even so, the bacterial load is normally safe, he notes. Ground beef is the biggest risk because it’s made up of parts from different animals, mixed together. So, practise good kitchen hygiene: clean your hands when handling meat and using a different cutting board from other food. Don’t mix hamburger meat with your hands, then make a salad. “You have to be kind of fastidious,” Zoutman says. “As a microbiologist working with concentrated bacteria, I know exactly where my hands have been.”
Other safety tips: thoroughly cook ground beef to an internal temperature of 71 Celsius measured with a food thermometer, before eating. And to stymie bacteria growth, refrigerate raw meat within two hours of purchase and within two hours after cooking.

Q. Is this incident as serious as the listeriosis outbreak that killed all those people a few years ago?
A. Becoming infected with E. coli 0157:H7, described by University of British Columbia food microbiologist Kevin Allen as “horrendous,” can be deadly. In this beef recall there have been no deaths, although five confirmed cases of Albertans falling ill have been traced back to tainted meat from the XL Foods plant.
In 1993, four children died in the United States of acute kidney failure after eating undercooked patties contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7 from the American fast-food chain Jack in the Box. An additional 600 others fell ill. Following the Jack in the Box tainted meat scandal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1994 declared E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant. Allen says Canada should also adopt a zero tolerance approach to this bacteria.

Q. Do we export these products and has any country other than the U.S. been affected?
A. The recall has not spread because the recalled products were distributed only in these two countries. On Sept. 13, the U.S. delisted the XL Foods plant from the Canadian facilities permitted to ship meat to the U.S.

Q. I thought the government was dealing with the potential for tainted meat after the listeriosis outbreak. Why is this still happening?
A. In August 2008, 23 Canadians died after consuming tainted deli meats produced by Maple Leaf Foods. The federal government responded by appointing independent investigator Sheila Weatherill to find out what went wrong. In July 2009, Weatherill issued 57 recommendations to fix the food-safety system. Last December, the government said it had implemented all recommendations.
But many of the changes were directed at the processing side of operations, not slaughter, says Rick Holley, professor of food safety at the University of Manitoba.

Canada’s Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz.

Q. Which federal ministry or agency is in charge during these kind of incidents?
A. Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, responsible for CFIA, has been in charge this past week.
Recall and food-borne illness investigations involve two-track probes: CFIA investigates the source of the contamination inside a plant and traces affected products through the supply chain to determine if recalls are necessary. Meanwhile, public-health authorities investigate if there’s a genetic match between the tainted food and any food-borne illnesses. Initially, CFIA, under Ritz, is in charge. Leadership transfers to the Public Health Agency of Canada if and when a food-borne illness is found in more than one province, making it a national foodborne outbreak.

Q. Is this the death knell for the beef industry or for beef exports?
A. This is not May 2003, when the discovery of a case of BSE (mad cow disease) in Canada immediately closed the U.S. border to imports of all Canadian beef and cattle. At the time, Canadian exports of cattle and beef products were worth approximately $4.5 billion, 80 per cent of which were destined for the American market (more than 70 per cent of all beef exports and almost 100 per cent of all cattle exports). The industry estimated losses of nearly $11 million a day in exports with the closed border, and around $7 million a day because of the drop in prices, according a Library of Parliament paper on the BSE crisis.
But keeping the U.S. border open to Canadian beef — and making sure American officials have confidence our exporting beef plants operate under standards that they consider to be as rigorous — is obviously on the mind of Ritz. He said earlier this week that he has spoken with his U.S. counterpart, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Q. What has the recall done for consumer demand? How about the price of beef at my supermarket?
A. David Wilkes, senior vice-president of the grocery division of the Canadian Retail Council, says “recognizing it’s early days, there has not been any substantive change” in the demand for beef products.
There hasn’t been any real change on pricing, either, says Wilkes, even though XL Foods, which produces about one-third of all beef products in Canada, has not been operating since last Sunday. “Certainly, they’re a big player. (Retailers) are sourcing from alternative suppliers at this point of in time, and have been able to satisfy demand. We have not had a sense on the pricing issue at this point. The focus has been on the food safety side in ensuring that the product that was affected was off the shelf so that we  could maintain that consumer confidence,” said Wilkes.

Related articles

• Meat recall may prompt changes to system Food-safety issue not detected at slaughterhouse (o.canada.com)
• Cattle vaccine could have prevented E. coli beef recall, researcher says (o.canada.com)
• Canada inspectors cite delays getting tainted meat data (news.yahoo.com)

It’s “irresponsible if not worse” that the vaccine, which prevents cattle from shedding the potentially deadly bacteria at the centre of this week’s massive meat recall, is not being widely used, says Brett Finlay at the University of British Columbia.

“It just breaks my heart, because these people should not be getting sick,” said Finlay, whose team developed the vaccine a decade ago.

The vaccine has long been celebrated as a Canadian success story: Finlay has been awarded several million of dollars to further the research and the federal and provincial governments have given millions of dollars in loans to an Ontario company to build a plant to mass-produce the vaccine.

But the vaccine is still not being used because it costs $6 per cow and there is no requirement that farmers vaccinate their animals.

“And now they are going to pay a huge price,” Finlay said in an interview Wednesday.

An E. coli outbreak at a slaughterhouse in Brooks, Alta., has triggered the largest beef recall in Canadian history, with upwards of 1.5 million pounds of beef from the XL Foods plant recalled by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

E. coli strain 0157:H7, which prompted the recall, is harmless to cows but can trigger a range of ailments in humans, from headaches, nausea and severe stomach cramps to bloody diarrhea, kidney damage and death.

In Alberta, officials have confirmed 10 cases of E. coli, four of them linked to meat from the XL Foods plant. There were also 13 E. Coli cases in Saskatchewan in September, compared to the norm of zero to four cases a month, but authorities are still investigating whether any are linked to the recalled beef.

In 2000, seven people died and hundreds more were sickened in Walkerton, Ont., by water contaminated with O157:H7 from grazing cows, and in 1993, four Americans died after an O157:H7 outbreak that was linked to contaminated beef patties at Jack in the Box restaurants in the United States.

Finlay designed the vaccine to eliminate the problem at its source: cows’ intestines.

About half of all cows carry E. Coli O157:H7 at some point in their lives and release the microbe in their feces.

“And you have these cows that are super-shedders, and they just pour out this 0157,” says Finlay, who suspects one or two super-shedders likely caused the problem at XL Foods.

“You can have a million inspectors you’ll never catch it all,” he says of the federal inspectors trying to prevent the microbe from ending up on meat products.

Studies have shown the vaccine, which the federal government licensed for use in Canada in 2008, reduces the amount of O157:H7 E. coli in a cow’s digestive tract by 99 per cent.

The vaccine prompts the cow’s immune system to create antibodies that prevent the bacteria from taking hold and growing in the animal’s gut.

Bioniche Life Sciences Inc. has licensed the rights to produce the vaccine and built a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Belleville, Ont., with the help of loans from the provincial and federal government.

Rick Culbert, president of food safety at Bioniche, says that plant can produce more than enough to vaccinate all of Canada’s cattle.

The “challenge,” he says, is in finding a way to get the cattle industry to adopt what is basically a “public health vaccine.”

In an ideal world, Culvert says federal health and agriculture officials would work together “to make it happen.”

The company says that E. Coli infections now cost about $250 million a year in terms of medical costs and lost work. It would cost $50 million a year to vaccinate the 12.5 million cattle in Canada.

Finlay, who has a long list of awards for his microbial work, including the Order of Canada, says he would get a “small royalty” from the vaccine producer if the vaccine use took off. “But I don’t really care about the money,” says Finlay. “I care about prevention.”

He would like the government and cattle industry to agree on a way to share the cost of a vaccination program, that could perhaps pass some of the expense on to consumers.  “I’m sure people wouldn’t mind paying a few cents more for ground beef.”

But he warns that without action cattle will keep shedding E. coli 0157:H7 and causing problems.

“It’s is going to happen again and again and again until they do something about it,” says Finlay.  “It’s just nature in action.”

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency did not respond to a request for comment on the use of the vaccine, while the Public Health Agency of Canada responded with brief email.

“The Agency generally supports the use of any scientifically validated measures that reduce public health risks from E. coli 0157:H7,” said Sylwia Gomes, a PHAC senior media relations adviser.

mmunro@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/margaretmunro

Related articles

• As meat recall widens, experts wonder why gaps in food safety haven’t been closed (o.canada.com)
• XL Foods delayed handing over tainted beef information, food inspectors say (news.nationalpost.com)
• Beef recall expands as food inspection agency vows to tighten rules (with video) (vancouversun.com)

On the positive side, the milk from the infected California dairy cow does not carry bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The cow was also never slaughtered for consumption, so the food supply remains untainted.

Barring further outbreak, this development should have no more than a minimal short-term headline risk on restaurants and could even be net positive, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Larry Miller.

He pointed to previous major incidents of mad cow in December 2003 and March 2006, when sales from quick-service and full-service restaurants did not underperform industry trends.

“In fact, they’ve generally outperformed, showing the short attention span and/or high level of confidence the American consumer has in the USDA and the US food supply,” Mr. Miller said in a note to clients.

The analyst also noted that in both cases, beef prices eased in the subsequent months. They fell an average of 19% in the 30 days following the December 2003 occurrence and 16% in 90 days.

“This magnitude of impact is unlikely to reoccur, in our view, given that decline stemmed primary from Japan completely shutting down US imports (it still only accepts cows under 20 months old),” Mr. Miller said.

He did suggest that a similar reaction to the March 2006 incidence could occur, where beef prices fell 5% in the first month and 7% of the next three months.

The analyst noted that the companies with the largest beef exposure in his coverage universe are Texas Roadhouse Inc., Jack in the Box Inc. and Wendy’s Co.