Food Safety Outbreak: ConAgra
When officials first traced E. Coli-tainted meat to a ConAgra plant in California in June 2002, company officials’ reaction was to refuse to provide a list of customers to whom they had shipped tons of potentially contaminated meat.
Health officials could have used that information to notify customers and possibly halt a wider outbreak of E. Coli, which was responsible for 47 illnesses in 23 states.
In mid-August, following public pressure, the company said it would “voluntarily provide its distribution list to states with confirmed E. coli cases.” State health officials could not make the list public, however, because the information was still considered a trade secret.
"Once (meat) is implicated in a recall and there is a public health risk, companies should forfeit the privacy of their customer information," said Carol Tucker-Foreman, who was the USDA's food safety director under Presidents Carter and Reagan and now works for the Consumer Federation of America.
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Sources
Krebs, AV. 2003. Profit-obsessed Meat Companies Keep Poisoning Consumers. Organic Consumers Association. January 5, accessed July 29, 2010
Migoya, D. 2002. ConAgra Stymied US, California: Emails indicate firm didn’t help find bad beef. The Denver Post Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. December 31, accessed August 13, 2010
