Today, Explained - Salmonella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

A deadly salmonella strain is spreading through American poultry, and there’s not much the government can do to stop it. ProPublica’s Bernice Yeung explains. Today’s show was produced by Will Reid with help from Grandma Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Welcome back to Terkay Explained. I'm your host, Grandma Chamberlain. On the show today, in preparation for our Thanksgiving feast this week, we're cooking up a classic, the Thanksgiving turducken. Ooh!

That's right, folks. We're talking about a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck stuffed into a deboned turkey. Ooh! A cornerstone of aviary excess. What could go wrong? Yeah! Uh, Grandma Chamberlain? Let's get started with your ingredients.

Grandma Chamberlain! Who's there? It's me, Sean Ramosforum. Ron? No, Sean. Oh, Sean! I'm doing a show. Try again later.

Well, actually, it's about the show, you know. You know how you said, what could go wrong? No, it's the Thanksgiving show. Right, yeah. It turns out something could go wrong. ProPublica just did this big investigation and found out that America's food safety system failed to stop a salmonella epidemic. Salmon? What? And it's still making people sick. No one's getting sick on the show today, Ron. Yeah, yeah. So let's go to Bernice Yeung from ProPublica. She's one of the investigation's co-authors. I was young once, you know. I bet. I bet. This particular story starts just a couple of years ago, though. In 2018, there was an outbreak with raw chicken

products. The source of the contamination hasn't been identified. It's so widespread, there's no one name the chicken is sold under. It ended up making 129 people sick. A couple dozen people were sent to the hospital and even one person died as a result of contact with chicken. Is this bad to say I made chicken fajitas last night? No, as long as you wash your hands. There's 2,500 strains of salmonella and not all of them actually make you sick. But this particular strain known as salmonella infant not all of them actually make you sick. But this particular strain, known as Salmonella infantis, was concerning to public health officials because it's multi-drug resistant. ...resistant to several of the antibiotics normally used to treat the infection.

Most of the common antibiotics would not work against this particular bug. The more we dug into this particular outbreak, we learned how unusual it was. It was all over the country. It was in 76 different poultry plants. And it was unclear where the source of this salmonella infantis was originating from. But obviously, there's testing going on at these chicken farms, right? People are employed to make sure that salmonella isn't spreading? There are some companies that do that type of testing on the farm, but it's not required. It's not required? No, there isn't any government oversight of the farms when it comes to food safety for humans.

When it comes to food safety, the USDA, their authority starts at the slaughterhouse door. Can they just like issue a recall to get all this tainted chicken out of supermarkets? How does it work? Well, you might think that they would be able to do that, but they can't. So the CDC doesn't have any regulatory powers at all. It can't tell anybody to do anything. It can make suggestions. The USDA, they actually don't have legal authority to order a recall. They have to request that the company issue a voluntary recall. But they can only really do that when they have almost like smoking gun evidence. They are often looking for somebody who got sick, who has an unopened package of that, in this case, chicken in their

freezer refrigerator. They'll take that, they'll test it. And if it matches and it's the same strain of salmonella as the one that made the person sick, then they will request that the recall happen. And so that's what happened with this Infantis outbreak. They didn't have the unopened package of chicken to test to request the recall. So because it was in 76 different plants, they knew that from testing that the government itself had done. They knew that that strain was in 76 different plants, but they couldn't stop it from being sold and they couldn't pull it back. So does that mean a bunch of people just get sick? That's essentially what happened with the Infantis outbreak is that this strain

was out, you know, in grocery stores across the country, but no ability to really take any action. The new consumer alert tonight, the CDC is now warning about a drug-resistant strain of salmonella found in raw chicken. The CDC, after a while, said that they had essentially learned everything that they could have learned from doing the investigation. So they closed the investigation. And in the investigation notice, they say, this is a strain of salmonella that is still widespread in the chicken industry and that other people could get sick as a result. And they leave it at that. Does that announcement make any waves? I think it's a big question how much those messages really reach the average consumer. It certainly was not on the radar of a man named Arthur Sutton and his partner, Marva Lamping, when they went out for Arthur's birthday back in 2019. They went to their favorite Mexican restaurant in town there from Oregon,

and they go to the same restaurant every year for their birthdays. I ate at El Rodeo Restaurant in Bend. They followed that same ritual, and they went and had their usual meal there. And then, unfortunately, that night, Arthur got incredibly ill and eventually had to go to the hospital. Sutton made two trips to the St. Charles Emergency Room in late July where he was treated for nausea and vomiting.

He was there for 16 days, battling, it turned out, a really severe form of salmonella infantis. You know, we read through more than 2,000 pages of medical records on what happened to Arthur Sutton at the hospital. And I have to say, it was a really horrific experience that he had in battling this salmonella. The salmonella entered into his bloodstream and he basically had salmonella poisoning in his blood. And it then started to reach all the other parts of his organs. He had tears and holes and leaks in his intestines. It created severe liver damage. He underwent more than a half dozen surgeries, and he unfortunately was taken off life support after 16 days in the hospital and died. Do we know that it was this particular strain of salmonella that killed him, salmonella infantis?

We do, for a couple reasons. In the medical records, it identifies salmonella infantis. The other thing that we did was that we were able to look at the exact genetic information of his salmonella sample that he gave that was tested, and it was very genetically similar to the Salmonella infantis outbreak strain. So it seems very closely related to the outbreak cases. Do you think he might have survived if doctors knew sooner about the infection? I think certainly if doctors had known that it was this Salmonella infantis, they could have gone and looked up all the various types of antibiotics that it's resistant to, and it could have informed the way that they treated him. Because what ended up happening

was because they didn't know what type of Salmonella it was at first, they were treating it with the types of antibiotics that they thought should work. When it didn't work, it was just a complete puzzlement to the doctors. And so, I mean, it's impossible to predict, but I'm sure the doctors wanted to be able to throw everything they could at the salmonella in order to try to save Arthur's life.

And they weren't able to do that. They didn't have that full complement of information at that time. And this particular variety of salmonella that he had, salmonella infantis, it's still out there. That's right. The head of the CDC foodborne division basically told us that this is an ongoing outbreak and they believe people are still getting sick. They've just handed me a card here that says there's more with Bernice after this breaks. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome back to Turkay Explained. My insulin friend Ron is regrettably still here. Thanks, Grams. Let's actually just kick it back to Bernice to hear how this is all okay.

I have to say that that was one of the most surprising things that I learned in the process of putting this story together was that it's totally legal, perfectly acceptable by our regulations to sell chicken, poultry, meat with salmonella on it. It's acceptable? Apparently, according to our laws, it is perfectly acceptable, fully legal, to sell salmonella-tainted meat and poultry. So you could go to your grocery store right now, pick up a package of chicken, and it could have salmonella in it. It may not, but it could, and that's fine. How did we get there? There's a little walk back in history, but essentially, the first laws that really contemplated food safety were introduced back in 1906. A good year.

This is right after the writer Upton Sinclair publishes his book, The Jungle, that looks at how terrible the meat processing plants are for workers. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage earners to this pitch of frenzy. But in the process, he describes how pretty disgusting the meat processing is back in those days. This is no fairy tale story and no joke. The meat will be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling will not trouble to lift out a rat, even when he saw one. And so it unleashed this demand for cleaner, safer, not rotten meat to be sold to the public. And from there, it required the USDA to inspect every single piece of meat that goes out to the public. There were inspectors in every meatpacking plant to make sure that the meat wasn't rotten or diseased. It gets that little USDA seal of approval.

But that law back in 1906 didn't contemplate pathogens, foodborne pathogens like salmonella. Salmonella had been discovered a couple decades before, but it wasn't really associated with foodborne illness and making people sick just yet. So salmonella wasn't even something that was part of the law or part of something that the government was trying to prevent until about the 1980s, 1990s. What happened then? Well, in 1993, there was the really horrific Jack in the Box hamburger outbreak involving E. coli. More than 150 people have become ill after eating tainted hamburger meat at Jack in the Box restaurant in Idaho and Washington State.

One child has died. Where a number of children died after eating E. coli tainted hamburger. And that really obviously shook people to their core and made food safety officials really reconsider what should be done when it comes to the safety of meat and poultry. So as a result of that, in 1994, they introduced a new approach to E. coli. We moved aggressively to step up inspections, and we proposed new regulations to use high-tech devices

to really check the meat for its purity. So they began to test for it, and if they found it, then you had to pull it from market. Is that controversial, or does that seem to sit well with the American public and even the agriculture industry? I think given how devastating that Jack in the Box outbreak was, it was seen as a necessary reform. Soon after the E. coli outbreak, the USD tried to do something similar with salmonella, where they started to test meat and poultry for salmonella. And if it exceeded the amounts that they at that time felt were appropriate, they would shut down or threaten to shut down the plants. failing to meet these salmonella standards repeatedly sued the federal government and said that they didn't have the right to shut down their processing facility because they had

salmonella in their beef. And in the end, that beef company prevailed. And in 2001, a court did find that the USDA has no ability to stop salmonella-tainted meat or poultry from going to market. They can't close down a plant. They can't punish any meat or poultry processor for having salmonella in their product. Because normal cooking practices destroy salmonella, the presence of salmonella in meat products does not render them injurious to health. Salmonella-infected meat is thus legal to sell to the consumer. As the order put it, salmonella is naturally occurring in these food animals. What does that mean? Salmonella can exist in the guts of chickens and cows, and it won't make them sick. It'll be part of their kind of,

you know, gut. But it doesn't mean that we have no ability to prevent harmful salmonella from reaching consumers. And in fact, in other countries, they have been able to eliminate salmonella altogether from their birds that are sold for human consumption. Dare I ask how they've done that? They do some vaccination. They also do a lot of testing. And if they find salmonella, then they will actually what's called depopulate the birds. They'll essentially kill them to make sure that there's no salmonella circulating among the flocks.

That's, of course, very costly for the chicken industry there. The other thing that they do is they have very high standards for cleanliness in their chicken houses. So sometimes they'll use concrete floors instead of the dirt floors that are common in the United States as a mechanism to limit the spread and proliferation of salmonella. And we just don't do those things here. We don't invest in concrete floors and more sanitary practices, and we don't invest in more aggressive testing that could end up in costly depopulation of chickens that are infected with salmonella. I think part of what's interesting about the chicken industry is it's so big. And there are some firms that do all of the things that I described.

I mean, I think the dirt floors are still pretty common, but do a lot of cleaning. And then there are others that don't. There's no regulation. There's no ability for food safety regulators to make any mandates on the farms when it comes to how it might affect human health. So what does that mean going forward? Is this just always going to be an issue? Are Americans just going to keep getting sick with salmonella as long as they eat chicken and turkey? So there has been some effort to try to totally upend and change how things are done. There are some industry representatives that have gotten together with consumer advocates to try to rethink this whole

system with how we deal with salmonella in meat and poultry in particular. And the USDA, you know, several weeks ago announced that they were also going to be taking some steps to think through changes and reforms to how salmonella is dealt with in meat and poultry. The USDA says the industry has succeeded in reducing the level of salmonella contamination found in poultry plants in recent years, but that hasn't translated into a significant reduction in the 1.35 million salmonella illnesses reported each year. Nothing terribly specific at this point, but they're going to convene meetings and try to get different solutions on the table.

What people are advocating for is a more targeted approach, either looking more at how much salmonella is being found on your poultry or looking for the types of salmonella that actually do make people sick. Is there an easy way to do that? What can people who are really committed to poultry do to stay safe? You can use our, what we've called the chicken checker. It's an app that we created and it helps you look up the track record of the processing plant that processed your turkey or chicken. So you can go to the grocery store, look up the P number, which is right near the mark of inspection, usually, and then you can find out how well your processor did. So as people sit down for Thanksgiving, should they be eating chicken?

Should they be eating turkey? You know, even after all these months of reporting and really going down the rabbit hole on salmonella and chicken, I eat a lot of chicken still. I just have kind of changed the way that I go about preparing it. You know, I make sure to use my meat thermometer. I make sure that I don't let the raw chicken, you know, touch my countertops. I'm no cross-contamination in my kitchen. No, thank you. But yeah, I think you should eat your poultry, but just be safe and how you handle it. And I think the other, I think important point to be made here is that whole chickens and whole turkeys are relatively salmonella free because it's the more processed the chicken gets, you know, the more it gets cut up, the more it gets ground,

the higher levels of salmonella you're likely to have on that product. But the whole chicken, the whole turkey, often salmonella free. That's good. Here I thought ProPublica was trying to cancel Thanksgiving. You guys are Often salmonella-free. That's good. Here I thought ProPublica was trying to cancel Thanksgiving. You guys are just trying to help people learn more about where their food comes from. We just want people to be informed consumers. Grandma Chamberlain, you hear that?

Just, you know, keep safety first in mind and you're going to be okay. You're not going to get anyone sick this Thanksgiving. Think you can handle that? Grandma Chamberlain? Grandma Chamberlain, hello, Grandma. Oh, my turducken. I think it's okay. I think you were dreaming.

You're good to go. Sorry to interrupt. Tell the people about, you know, your recipe, your ingredients, whatever it was. Well, finally it was. Well, finally! Today's turducken will essentially be made using Will Ride. But you'll also need some Epheme Shapiro, Matthew Collett, and regrettably, Ron Ramiswar.

Once you're finished prepping, you'll want to have Laura Bouillard close by to look it all over. And be sure to have your Amina Alsadi plugged in on the counter. You always need Amina Alsadi. Harimawada, Brian Miles, Halima Shea, and Victoria Chamberlain are in the fridge. And then in the pantry, you'll have Jillian Weinberger and Liz Kelly-Nels. Or store-bought is fine. And then, already on the stove, I'm simmering some Breakmaster cylinders and Gnome Hassenfields. Turducken should be ready in no time. Happy Thanksgiving,

everyone. I'm so thankful you turned into Turkay Explained. It's part of the Vox Media Poultry Network. We're taking the rest of the week off for the holiday, and we'll be back on Monday. And

remember, if you forgot to take your bird out of the freezer, it's already too late. Thanksgiving is cancelled.