Non-0157 E. coli Testing Initiative Moving Along
The USDA is getting closer to testing for the six most common non-0157 shiga toxin E. coli types, said an official from the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). Dan Engeljohn, chief policy writers for FSIS, told an industry convention that the regulator currently is driving the development of validated testing to identify the six most commonly occurring shiga toxin E. coli types that currently are not screened. Engeljohn said that FSIS is almost there.
“We have that test validated for four of the six non-O157 STECS. We’re very close to having a methodology for all six,” Engeljohn was quoted as saying by Meantingplace.com. “Your expectation should be that a federal register notice would identify a rationale as to how the agency believes it could and should move forward with an enforcement strategy.”
Engeljohn told Meatingplace.com there will be public meetings and issue guidance. Implementation would be slow because the agency is not yet ready to conduct full-scale testing, and the industry should expect FSIS to initially focus on trim for ground beef, he said.
E. coli lawyers at PritzkerOlsen, P.A., have been calling for this change for years to fill a deadly dangerous gap in food safety rules. While E. coli 0157:H7 is banned by the government in ground beef — a law that requires meatpackers to test for the pathogen — other types of E. coli that produce equally lethal shiga toxins inside the human body are currently exempt from testing and are not legally defined as adulterants in ground beef.
According to Dr. Patricia Griffin, an E. coli expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 70 percent of non-O157 E. coli types isolated from humans fall into six serogroups, which are (in order of frequency): O26, O103, O111, O121, O45, and O145. The CDC estimates that in the United States about half the diarrheal illnesses caused by shiga toxin-producing E. coli bacteria are due to O157 and about half to the other subtypes of toxic E. coli. Contaminated ground beef continues to be the biggest cause for these E. coli infections.
Whatever the type, if a bacterium is making shiga toxins in the gastrointestinal tract of an infected individual, that person is at risk for developing hemolytic uremic syndrome HUS or thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP). PritzkerOlsen represents HUS TTP victims in E. coli outbreaks and has been doing so for many years. If laws are changed to add non-0157 types of shiga toxin-producing E. coli to the list of adulterants in ground beef, American consumers will win stronger protection in their efforts to recover monetarily from the harms they suffer. But more importantly, screening for additional types of E. coli will reduce the prevalence of these dangerous pathogens from our food supply and make food — especially ground beef — safer for everyone.
The change is long overdue and eagerly anticipated.
Tags: E coli O145, HUS Litigation
