Dive Summary:
- With the onset of contaminants in produce in the beginning of 2013, namely lettuce contaminated with e. Coli in the past couple of weeks, the leafy greens industry is at a bit of a crossroads.
- Experts are saying lessons can be learned from the sprout industry, who experienced their own food safety fiasco about a year ago.
- namely, a pre-shipping wash may not be enough to guarantee the safety of leafy greens. Irradiation or other methods may be required.
From the article:
It was the illustrious wartime leader, Winston Churchill, who said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” With this in mind it was somewhat inevitable that the first major news stories of 2013 have been the outbreaks in Canada and Ohio linked to lettuce contaminated with E coli O157:H7. The industry falls back on the low incidence of pathogens on produce and the miniscule number of foodborne illness cases compared to the millions of bag salads sold daily. However, it is generally acknowledged that there are increasing concerns about the microbiological safety of leafy greens, especially bagged salad. One only has to review the growing list of recalls and outbreaks linked to leafy greens in 2012 to see that the industry in heading for a crisis.
So what do foodborne illness outbreaks have to do with sprouted seeds? Well, those in the produce sector have a tendency to distance themselves from sprouted seeds. There maybe some good reason for this, as sprouted seeds have and continue to be implicated in foodborne illness outbreaks linked to E coli O157:H7, Salmonella and occasionally Listeria monocytogenes. If we go back to leafy greens, the key outbreak that stimulated action and changes in the industry was that implicating E coli O157:H7-contaminated spinach that resulted in over 200 confirmed cases of illness along with 3 deaths. In the case of sprouts, the major outbreak occurred in Japan in 1996 involving radish sprouts contaminated with E coli O157:H7, resulting in over 6000 cases and 12 deaths. As one could imagine, this outbreak, along with others that occurred periodically, stimulated the government and industry to take action. Through various lines of research it was found that the seed used in sprout production was the source of human pathogens in 99% of cases. Consequently, it was proposed to use 20,000 ppm hypochlorite as a seed disinfection step even though it was recognized that the sanitizer was not totally effective at eliminating pathogens. Critically, the hypochlorite treatment was the only one recommended by the FDA guidelines published in 1999, and it become carved in stone. At the same time, the outputs of research were delivering more effective seed decontamination methods compared to hypochlorite. However, because they were not included in the sprout growers guidelines the industry turned their back on the new technologies.
