IRRADIATION?
The following letter was sent to the editor
of the North County Times in Oceanside, California
on December 10, 1997
and became the basis of a guest editorial

Dear Editor:

On the day that Lynda Ensign's letter (FDA-approved meat irradiation fails to protect; NCT 12-10-97; pp. A-11) appears in your "Letters" section, it is ironic that the North County Times has a front page article entitled, "Food poisoning on the rise."

Some one must be out of step, and I believe it is Ms. Ensign.

This holiday season will mark the fifth Christmas our family will be without our son, Eric, who died after eating E.coli contaminated meat, at the age of 13. Since his death I have worked to prevent other families from having to undergo what happened to our family.

In my quest to clean up America's meat supply, I have met with Department of Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, testified before Congress, and met with both President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. I have also met and discussed food safety with many Senators and Congressmen both in Washington and Sacramento. I have attended many meetings and conferences with meat industry officials and food scientists. I even helped formulate the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) which is now the law for the meat processing industry. And lastly, I have served as the national president of the grassroots organization STOP (Safe Tables Our Priority), which is made up primarily of victims and families of food borne illnesses.

This past February, I traveled to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa to see their meat irradiation facility. I believe I am one of the handful of people who has actually seen such a facility. I tasted irradiated meat and I was impressed.

I'd like to correct the misinformation which Ms. English has perpetrated on the readers of her letter.

First off, meat is muscle tissue, which according to the USDA is sterile. It only becomes contaminated when it comes in contact with feces or intestinal fluids during slaughter. And then it is only the outside of the meat which is contaminated. This contamination can be effectively removed with steam pasteurization. The tragedy of hamburger meat is that once the meat has been ground, what was once on the outside can now be on the inside, and the only way to eliminate these extremely toxic pathogens is to cook the meat until the middle reaches 160 degrees Fahrenheit for at least 15 seconds. This process was signed into law here in California by Governor Pete Wilson this past August. But this law now forces restaurants to cook all their hamburgers well done, and many Californians don't want their burgers well done.

There is an alternative: irradiation.

In all of my meetings and conferences I have always stressed that irradiation cannot be a substitute for plant and individual cleanliness and proper handling techniques. I have been assured by government meat inspectors that this would never happen under federal inspection mandates, especially now with the HACCP regulations in place.

Hepatitis is not a pathogen found in meat during the processing stage nor is it transmitted from animals to humans. Hepatitis is transmitted from infected humans to other humans via unwashed hands after use of restroom facilities or use of human feces as fertilizer. That's the reason why the hepatitis virus is found on fruits and vegetables. In fact the largest recent hepatitis outbreak in this country occurred earlier this year when a San Diego company illegally used Mexican strawberries to supply frozen fruit for the federal lunch program.

Eating fruits and vegetable doesn't make you immune to food borne illnesses. Since the beginning of this decade, this country has experienced many food borne outbreaks from sources other than meat: in 1991 cantaloupes, in 1994 ice cream, in 1995 alfalfa sprouts, and last year this country saw a food poisoning epidemic in New England traced to ready-to-eat lettuce, eggs in the South, and apple juice on the West Coast. We've also had problems traced to Guatemalan raspberries, another fruit which extended to 20 states.

Cobalt 60 is an outdated method of food irradiation. The latest technology is linear acceleration, which uses electricity to create radiation, exactly the same way hospital and dental x-rays are created. Once the switch is turned off, the radiation source is gone. This is the system I saw in Iowa and it is the system which meat and food processors are now looking at and adopting. Keep in mind that neither method of irradiation produces radioactive foods.

It is true that currently slightly less than half of the people are comfortable with irradiated foods, up from just 15% several years ago. Studies have now shown that once these same people are educated about the process and its benefits, their acceptance level jumps to up to 85%.

The false hysteria presented by Ms. Ensign is almost word for word the same false hysteria used when milk pasteurization was first proposed 100 years ago. If you substitute the words "milk" for "meat" and "pasteurization" for "irradiation", you will find an amazing similarity between the letters written to the editor then as now. It was this sort of myth-mongering which kept milk pasteurization from becoming a reality for over 50 years! Yet today no one doubts the effectiveness of milk pasteurization. This technology, along with chlorination of water and immunizations has increased American's life expectancy from 48 years at the turn of the last century to 76 at the turn of this century, and increase of almost 60%!

I agree that irradiation is not the magic silver bullet, but rather one of the tools which should be used as the missing piece in reducing the risk of illness and in my son's case, death. Irradiation is supported by the World Health Organization, various other international agencies, scientists and government officials. Until we find the source and eliminate pathogenic E.coli, salmonella, cyclospora, Listeria, and others, as well as parasitic diseases, we should use the technologies available to us.

Rainer Mueller