The U.S. government on Sunday ordered the largest beef recall in U.S. history -- 143.4 million pounds -- and said the meat has been used in school lunches and food assistance programs.
The beef dates to cattle slaughtered two years ago, starting Feb. 1, 2006. The USDA said it believes most already has been eaten. It will remove the rest from inventories.
"We don't know exactly where all the product went" but will "cast a wide net to make sure that we can find all the product that we can find," Ken Petersen at the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service said in a conference call with reporters Sunday.
The government portrayed the action as precautionary and classified it as a Class II recall, meaning there is little likelihood of illness.
Operations have been suspended at the slaughterhouse, Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing, based in Chino, Calif. The facility continues to be under investigation, the USDA said.
The meatpacker is accused of improperly slaughtering what are called "downer" cattle -- those unable to walk to slaughter.
Such cattle raise the fear of mad cow disease and are more likely to carry E. coli and salmonella bacteria.
The government said it had inspectors present "continuously" at the plant, as is standard procedure.
Even so, the use of downer cattle was brought to light by the Humane Society of the United States, which published a video last month it said was made by an undercover worker at Hallmark/Westland. The video shows cattle lying on the ground being moved by forklifts and being chained and pulled.
In a statement Sunday, the Humane Society said, "A recall of this staggering scale proves that it's past time for Congress and the USDA to strengthen our laws for the sake of people and animals."
The huge recall will put the safety of the U.S. beef supply "front and center" in Congress, said William Marler, a prominent food-safety lawyer.
He said it also will raise questions about USDA inspection of meat plants. "It's hard to imagine ... that they couldn't figure this out sooner."
U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said Sunday that the recall "raises alarming questions about the U.S. Department of Agriculture's ability to monitor the safety of meat that is being shipped to our nation's schools. It is outrageous that it took a non-governmental organization to shed light on the egregious abuses that were happening right under the USDA's nose."
Miller said the USDA "still can't tell us exactly which schools may have received this tainted meat, or how much of it has already been consumed or reprocessed into other foods."
The previous record for a meat recall was 35 million pounds in 1999 by Thorn Apple Valley, the government said.
The most recent large meat recall was 21.7 million pounds of ground beef by Topps Meat of Elizabeth, N.J., in September for E. coli contamination linked to reports of 32 illnesses.
Only 2.2 million pounds of the meat were recovered in the recall, USDA data show.
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