Posted on 09/13/2002 6:01:34 PM PDT by GeneD
Filed at 8:44 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Agriculture Department has failed to adequately answer questions about how the agency handled a recall of 19 million pounds of contaminated hamburger meat, four members of Congress said in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman.
The four lawmakers -- Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.; Mary Kaptur, D- Ohio; Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.; and Sen. Richard Durbin R-Ill. -- demanded in a letter Thursday that the agency explain why it failed to quickly recall the meat after initial tests showed it was contaminated with E. coli bacteria.
They said Elsa Murano, the department's undersecretary for food safety, didn't answer important questions while providing them with more details about the ConAgra Beef Co. recall in a letter dated Sept. 5.
Murano didn't explain why the department's Food Safety and Inspection Service took nearly three months to stop the sale of the meat after tests in May and June showed it had E. coli bacteria, they said.
The Agriculture Department didn't issue a full recall until July 19.
``We made these requests because ConAgra, one of the largest meat producers in the United States, may have had evidence of positive E. coli 0157:H7 results as early as mid-April,'' lawmakers wrote.
Murano also didn't elaborate on ConAgra's actions, they noted.
``We have heard reports that USDA asked ConAgra for the additional bacterial samples, but the company has refused to provide them. Is this true?'' the congressional members asked Veneman.
In addition, the lawmakers want to know if food safety officials are providing the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with enough information to link cases of human illness to the contaminated beef.
Alisa Harrison, a spokeswoman for Veneman, declined to comment, saying the department hasn't had time to review the letter.
The recall of meat from Greeley, Colo.-based ConAgra was the country's second largest meat recall ever. The Agriculture Department issued a nationwide recall because it was uncertain where the meat was sold.
At the time of the recall, 17 people in Colorado had been sickened by the beef. At least six other cases of illnesses caused by E. coli were reported in California, Michigan, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming, but a link to ConAgra beef was indefinite.
The lawmakers said they also were alarmed that inspectors found safety problems at the ConAgra beef plant, as Murano's letter pointed out. They asked that Veneman's agency explain what those deficiencies were.
ConAgra officials did not immediately return a phone call Friday for comment.
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On the Net:
Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service: http://www.fsis.usda.gov/index.htm
ConAgra Beef Co. : http://www.conagrabeef.com
I thought Durbin is a Democrat.
Is someone trying to pretend this isn't a partisan move on the part of the Democrats?
They way the word "lawmakers" is so frequently and casually used gives clue to what congress thinks of itself. They think they are like a business in the sense that a business objective is to create more and more products and gain more and more market share. Members of congress think they're in the business of creating more and more laws that encroach on more and more people.
Congress has created so many laws that virtually every person is assured of breaking more than just traffic laws. Surely with all this supposed lawlessness people and society should have long ago run head long into destruction. But it has not.
Instead, people and society have progressively prospered. Doing so despite politicians creating on average, 3,000 new laws each year which self-serving alphabet-agency bureaucrats implement/utilize to justify their usurped power and unearned paychecks. They both proclaim from on high -- with complicit endorsement from the media and academia -- that all those laws are "must-have" laws to thwart people and society from running headlong into self-destruction.
Again, despite not having this year's 3,000 must-have laws people and society increased prosperity for years and decades prior. How can it be that suddenly the people and the society they form has managed to be so prosperous for so long but suddenly they will run such great risk of destroying their self-created prosperity? Three hundred new laws each year is overkill, but 3,000 is, well, it's insane.
Politics is not the solution, it's the problem. Honest business and science is the solution. It has always been the solution.
War of Two Worlds
Value Creators versus Value Destroyers
The first thing civilization must have is business/science. It's what the family needs so that its members can live creative, productive, happy lives. Business/science can survive, even thrive without government/bureaucracy.
Government/bureaucracy cannot survive without business/science. In general, business/science and family is the host and government/bureaucracy is a parasite.
Keep valid government services that protect individual rights and property. ...Military defense, FBI, CIA, police and courts. With the rest of government striped away those few valid services would be several fold more efficient and effective than they are today.
Underwriters Laboratory is a private sector business that has to compete in a capitalist market. Underwriters laboratory is a good example of success where government fails.
Any government agency that is a value to people and society -- which there are but a few -- could much more effectively serve people by being in the private sector where competition demands maximum performance.
Wake up! They are the parasites. We are the host. We don't need them. They need us.
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