America’s food safety system failed to stop a salmonella epidemic. It’s still making people sick
Food Hazards in Animal Flesh and By-products from All-Creatures.org Vegan Health Articles

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From Bernice Yeung, Michael Grabell, Irena Hwang, Mollie Simon, TheCounter.org
November 2021

For years, a dangerous salmonella strain has sickened thousands and continues to spread through the chicken industry. The USDA knows about it. So do the companies. And yet, contaminated meat continues to be sold to consumers.

The USDA’s salmonella testing efforts have fallen short, on an average day in 2020, the organization took about only 80 samples of raw poultry across hundreds of processing plants which slaughter more than 25 million chickens and turkeys a day. Criticism has come from within, the USDA’s own research arm has said the agency’s measure for salmonella is “not a good indicator” of food safety. iStock/Syldavia

For years, a dangerous salmonella strain has sickened thousands and continues to spread through the chicken industry. The USDA knows about it. So do the companies. And yet, contaminated meat continues to be sold to consumers.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
In May 2018, a rare and virulent strain of salmonella caught the attention of America’s top disease detectives. In less than two months, the bacteria had sickened more than a dozen people, nearly all of them on the East Coast. Many said they’d eaten chicken, and federal food safety inspectors found the strain in chicken breasts, sausages and wings during routine sampling at poultry plants.

But what seemed like a straightforward outbreak soon took a mystifying turn. Cases surfaced as far away as Texas and Missouri. A 1-year-old boy from Illinois and a 105-year-old woman from West Virginia fell ill. There was a teenager who’d just returned from a service trip in the Dominican Republic and a woman who’d traveled to Nicaragua. But there were also people who hadn’t traveled at all.

Victims were landing in the hospital with roiling stomach pains, uncontrollable diarrhea and violent bouts of vomiting. The source of the infections seemed to be everywhere.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted that an outbreak of salmonella infantis, a multidrug-resistant strain, was “widespread in the chicken industry” and believed to be expanding. Regardless, they closed their investigation in 2019 as no further actions could be taken to stop the spread. iStock/Polawat Klinkulabhirun

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