Autumn of 2013 was a stressful time for the Craten family, who live outside of Phoenix, Arizona. In summary, three family members were diagnosed with the same type of salmonella infection. Salmonella is a food-borne bacteria that can travel on poultry, and as they later discovered, it was sweeping the United States for a while. nationwide outbreak.
All they knew at the time was that their 18-month-old son, Noah, was the sickest of the relatives: daily fever, inability to walk, and drooping on one side of his face. Thanks to a CT scan, doctors discovered the infection had formed a rapidly growing abscess inside his brain. Emergency surgery saved his life, but the pressure from the tumor left lasting damage, affecting language and sensory processing and leaving him with a learning disability.
Noah Craten is now 10 years old, a nimble kid love to play Minecraft and have an aide to help him through school. And his mother, Amanda, is an activist, a leader in Confederation of consumer groups that may have created the biggest change in federal food safety regulation in 20 years. Last week, under pressure from these groups, the US Department of Agriculture announced that consider reform to how it regulates the processing and sale of live poultry, the biggest source of salmonella contamination. If changes are made, it will give the agency the power to monitor salmonella contamination in live poultry and slaughterhouses, and the power to compel producers to recall contaminated meat from the market.
The agency does not currently have those powers, although salmonella causes more serious illness than any other foodborne pathogen. It hurts about 1.35 million won people in the US each year; about 26,500 of them were hospitalized and 420 died. At its mildest, it causes fever and diarrhea that can last up to a week. But because it can travel into the bloodstream and enter bones, joints, and the nervous system, it often leaves victims with arthritis and circulatory problems.
Today, the USDA can only require meat producers to voluntarily recall their products, and companies don’t always move as quickly as the agency would like. That leaves consumers vulnerable to threats they didn’t know existed. Amanda Craten said: “Noah fell ill towards the end of a 14-month outbreak. “If there had been some oversight and early withdrawal, my son wouldn’t have been sick.”
The reforms could be announced on October 14 by the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. They are included in what FSIS calls a “proposed framework,” which are the first steps in a process that may not be resolved until near the 2024 election. But what if that process leads to regulation. , it would mark a lasting change in the US authority on food safety.
“The exciting thing about this new proposal is that it would apply to all raw chicken products, which could play a huge role in the number of salmonella cases we see,” said Sarah Sorscher, an attorney. as deputy managing director said jobs at the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, petition to USDA four times published the most dangerous strain contaminants and regulated them. “If we can reduce the risk in these products, we really have a chance to bend the curve in foodborne illness.”
