After Last Year's E. Coli Outbreak, Produce Testing Diverged at Border

Early last month, Dole Food sent thousands of pounds of lettuce, picked mostly in California, through its processing plant in Springfield, Ohio, where a company inspector looked for defects before sending it along a conveyer belt. There it was washed three times, dried and deposited into half-pound packages of Heart's Delight salad mix.

About 6,000 bags were loaded into refrigerated trucks, most destined for nearby states, where they would be put into grocery store cases without further examination. But 528 bags went to Canada, where the government had responded to last year's E. coli contamination of spinach by more than doubling random tests of leafy greens. Those tests, at a distribution warehouse in Ontario, detected E. coli bacteria and led to a massive recall not only in Canada but in nine states.

A year after the contaminated spinach -- also packaged under the Dole label -- killed at least three Americans and sickened hundreds of others, manufacturers, regulators and lawmakers in the United States are still arguing about how to ensure leafy greens are grown and handled safely. Canada, however, has already moved forward, focusing on catching potential problems before they reach retail shelves.

By last year, Canada, which gets about 90 percent of its lettuce and spinach from the United States, had already become worried about the safety of the goods it was receiving. There had been several produce-related outbreaks in recent years, and Canadian authorities had documented one illness related to the spinach problem last year but suspected there were more cases. Mirroring the initial reaction of U.S. industry, Canadian industry officials called for tighter control of the supply chain, assurances that farmers were abiding by acceptable agricultural standards and more scientific research into the causes of the problems.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency went further. It diverted resources dedicated to testing the quality of goods and more than doubled the size of its safety program. Instead of 550 tests of several types of produce each year, Canada now tests 600 samples of leafy greens and another 600 of tomatoes in addition to increased testing of other produce.

The testing takes place in one of Canada's five government labs. For lettuce, it will typically mean taking five bags or items from a single lot in for checking. "We should have been more aggressive before" last year's E. coli contamination, said Ren¿ Cardinal, acting national manager of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's fresh fruit and vegetable program.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency also requires U.S. importers to be part of a voluntary California program that sets minimum production standards. "If there is somebody that is not under the leafy green agreement, we put out a border alert" and that company will be refused at the border, Cardinal said.

The measures have already produced results, he said. Despite the Dole recall this year, "you can see an improvement. We have no known outbreak," Cardinal said. "If they keep up going like that, the confidence level will be there" among consumers.

In the United States, David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's food safety director, has dismissed the idea of simply increasing tests as Canada did, saying that the problem requires a more complex approach and that you cannot test your way to safety.

"End-product testing is a very expensive and unsure way to ensure that there is a safe product," said Acheson. "You have to do a heck of a lot of it." The agency will focus on "putting the resources and the actions where the risk is," Acheson said. FDA officials say it is more productive to identify vulnerable points within the production process and develop testing or policies to prevent them.

The disparity between the U.S. and Canadian response to the spinach contamination is troubling to consumer advocates who say the FDA's reliance on voluntary standards is outdated. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, outbreaks of illness related to produce contamination have doubled since 1998. The FDA inspects farms for leafy greens on average once every 3.9 years and conducts 900 sample tests a year. It has no mandatory industry standards.

Efforts to regulate the industry have stalled on the federal and state level, while consumer confidence has fallen: Sixty-six percent of consumers are confident in the food they find in the grocery store this year, down from 82 percent last year, according to the Food Marketing Institute. "The crisis in food safety ought to be an urgent priority for FDA, but this administration has not given the agency the direction or the resources it needs to make sure that food on the tables of American families is safe," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who has been critical of the FDA's handling of the outbreaks.