Texas Gets An “F” In Reporting Outbreaks Of Foodborne Illness

Remember, back during the election, when Hank Gilbert was traveling around the state talking a lot about food safety and the need to consolidate food safety from field to fork under the Texas Department of Agriculture? Well, he was right.

Via the Houston Press‘ Hair Balls blog, we find this gem about reporting of foodborne illness in Texas:

If you live in Texas and eat food, you will probably die, or at least become violently ill. That’s what we’re taking away from a study that gives the Lone Star state an “F” in reporting outbreaks of foodborne illness.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest studied ten years’ worth of CDC data and decided that the more reporting of such outbreaks a state has, the more likely it is to have a swift-acting, effective public health system.

Because Texas only reported an average of one outbreak per one million people, we apparently blow. Our fellow
flunkies in the back row include Arizona, Arkansas, Nevada, Indiana and Kentucky, and eight others. Wyoming, home to a few dozen people and a shitload of cattle, got an “A.”

“These findings suggest that many states lack adequate funding for public health services, leading to health departments that are overburdened and understaffed,” the report states. “The result is decreased outbreak investigation and detection and an incomplete picture of foodborne illness across the country.”

If you’re a Texan and want to know the specific pathogen that will inevitably worm its way into your system and make you vomit uncontrollably, it will most likely be salmonella. That foul bacteria accounted for 15 percent of the reported outbreaks. However, two percent of you will probably eat a mouthful of listeria, then come down with
listeriosis and then die.

Because my firm did the opposition research for Democratic Ag Commissioner nominee Hank Gilbert, I’m intimately familiar with the complete and utter disaster that is food safety in Texas and am completely unsurprised that the state got a big, fat “F.” However, when Hank was traveling the state talking about it–and sending out press release after press release about it–the media turned a deaf ear and his opponent, incumbent Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples couldn’t scream loud enough (especially to the Dallas Morning News editorial board) that TDA had no role to play when it came to food safety.

Even when tainted celery was causing deaths, the media seemed to care little about food safety in the context of the race for Texas Agriculture Commissioner.

Even when we released a particularly terrifying group of documents from the Texas Department of State Health Services, the press didn’t take note of it, presumably because death and diarrhea aren’t sexy enough for the modern media. Here are the highlights from some of those DSHS documents (documents can be found here), which I distilled into a press release for Hank’s campaign last summer:

• Many food manufacturers unlicensed by DSHS who deliberately or accidentally fail to obtain a license are licensed by other state agencies including the Texas Department of Agriculture, the Texas Secretary of State, or the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts.

• Distributors of fresh, uncut produce are exempt from DSHS licensing requirements and FDA standards.

• Businesses that repackage but do not process fresh, uncut produce are exempt from DSHS licensing requirements and FDA standards.

• With the exception of milk, seafood, and meat, no state regulation exists relating to the transport of food products.

• Food manufacturers and distributors aren’t required to test their products for pathogens causing human disease (excluding some exceptions such as milk, meat, and bottled water).

• Food manufacturers who voluntarily test for disease-causing pathogens aren’t required to report positive test results to the state.

Additional documents released by the Department of State Health Services relating to salmonella tainted peanuts processed at the Plainview, Texas facility of Peanut Corporation of America—one of two PCA plants at the epicenter of a 2008-2009 salmonella outbreak—show confusion over whether or not specific state agencies possess the
authority to inspect farms, that the Deputy Commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture was calling a state agency to determine if a municipality had licensed the PCA Plainview facility, and significant confusion over what state agency may—or may not—have been inspecting agricultural products for salmonella contamination near the
Texas-Oklahoma border in the days and weeks following the recall.

Did you catch all that? In most cases, food manufacturers and processors aren’t required to test for disease and illness-causing pathogens. That’s pretty damned scary, if you ask me. Perhaps, now that a report has given the state an “F” the Legislature will have better sense than the media (or Commissioner Todd Staples, for that matter) and actually take some action–but we’re not holding our breath.