What if it were possible to almost entirely do away with E. coli in ground beef and it would cost only about a penny a burger?
Food-safety experts say it's entirely feasible with new technologies that have become available. One is a vaccine, the other a feed additive, which, given early enough, could bring down potential E. coli contamination to negligible levels.
The problem, experts in beef safety say, is that the economics are backward. The new interventions have to be administered long before the cattle are slaughtered, when the calves are young or in feed lots where they're growing.
It's hard to figure out who should pay for steps that would take place months and possibly years before the grill starts sizzling. The people who'd have to pay for them aren't the ones who would reap the direct benefits.
Researchers at Harvard University estimate that American beef consumers are willing to pay 1 cent to 2 cents a pound to reduce the risk of E. coli O157:H7 illnesses. "Common sense plus our paper and many others suggest consumers will pay more for safer food," says James Hammitt, who co-wrote a paper on consumer willingness to pay for food safety in the September edition of the journal Risk Analysis.
These interventions aren't perfect, but they're very good, says Guy Loneragan, a professor of food safety at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. "The question is no longer, 'Can we get the technologies?' We've got them, or they're soon to arrive. The question is 'How do we implement?'"
"This is really good news," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, food-safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "This is a huge advance in the war against these pathogenic strains of E. coli."
So far only two small companies appear to be embracing them. One is a tiny feed lot cooperative in Kansas that's looking to vaccinate all its cattle "soon." The other is a Meade, Kan., cooperative that's staking its economic life on calling for retailers nationally to demand these interventions from the packers that supply their meat.
The game may be changing, however. At a meeting earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture started a discussion that might move things along.
The regulatory landscape "is confusing," says Elisabeth Hagen, USDA's undersecretary for food safety. "But we're realizing that there's an issue here and somehow we have to bring everybody together and focus on the end product, the result of which is the safety of the food that goes to the American consumer."
Nancy Donley, whose son died from E. coli O157:H7 in a hamburger, went on to found the non-profit STOP Foodborne Illness.
Consumers are happy to pay for additional safety, Donley says. "We need to do something at the source" before cattle go to slaughter, she says. "This is something we've been crying for for ages."
Taming the E. coli threat
E. coli bacteria live in the guts of most mammals. There are many types of E. coli and almost all are harmless to the animals. Many are beneficial. But a few, including O157:H7, secrete a toxin that doesn't hurt cattle but does hurt and can kill humans if they eat meat contaminated with it.
E. coli doesn't live inside the muscle, so steaks and roasts aren't likely routes of contamination -- because if there's E. coli on the outside, it's killed when they're cooked.
Hamburger is a different story, because the meat is ground up, mixing any potential E. coli on the outside deep into the ground beef. If you don't cook it to 160 degrees, all the way through, E. coli O157:H7 can still be alive inside the burger.
The CDC estimates that each year about 2,138 people are hospitalized from O157:H7 and 20 die.
To date, most efforts to control E. coli O157:H7 have focused on the slaughter process. There are washes done before the hide is removed, washes after it's been taken off, steam-cleaning of carcasses and thermal pasteurization. There's even a blue light that makes chlorophyll, found in pasture grass in manure, easier to see. Where there's manure, there could be E. coli O157:H7. "The beef industry has been very proactive about adopting these technologies," says Smith DeWaal, adding that they've gone a long way toward reducing E. coli levels in ground meat.
Loneragan says they've gone as far as they can after the animal is slaughtered. Now the focus needs to be on ridding the animals of E. coli O157:H7 before they get to the slaughterhouse. The new methods to do that involve:
A vaccine. The biggest and potentially most game-changing treatment is a vaccine introduced by Pfizer Animal Health in 2010 and given in a three-shot series starting when the calf is just 6 months old. This gets rid of the E. coli O157:H7 bacteria in 85% of the cattle, says Brad Morgan, a senior food-safety specialist at Pfizer Animal Health in Stillwater, Okla. Not only that, but even among the ones that still have the bacteria in the gut, the injections reduce the amount the animals shed in their manure by 98%, he says.
It's not all or nothing. Pfizer has done studies showing that if only 50% or even 25% of cattle are vaccinated, rates of E. coli are strongly reduced in the feed yard, and therefore in the packing plant. And Harvard's Hammitt says his research shows that Americans understand that food can't be "perfectly safe," but they want safer.
The vaccine costs $4 to $6 per animal for the full series, says Loneragan. There are several other vaccines in the regulatory pipeline here and overseas.
The probiotic. The other intervention is a probiotic added to feed. These are beneficial bacteria cultures that out-compete the more dangerous forms of E. coli in the cattles' guts, much as yogurt is said to seed the gut with good bacteria to keep out the bad. Many studies have found that using "the right strain at the right dose you can get a fairly predictable 40% to 50% reduction in E. coli O157:H7," says Loneragan.
The probiotics are commonly used in feed lots, though not always at the higher dosages that are really helpful. The higher dose costs $2 to $4 per animal, says Loneragan.
So why don't all beef processors take these steps?
The American Meat Institute Foundation, the research arm of the meat industry trade group, says there just isn't enough data yet to know if these treatments work. While there's been a tremendous amount of research and it looks promising, "We're right at the cusp of understanding the technology," says Betsy Booren, the institute's director of scientific affairs.
Last year Cargill, one of the nation's largest beef producers, conducted a trial of the E. coli vaccine on 85,000 head of cattle at its Fort Morgan, Colo., beef-processing facility, says spokesman Mike Martin at Cargill's Wichita headquarters.
The trial's results were "inconclusive," Martin says, in part because the levels of O157:H7 they found on the cattle in general "were the lowest in years . " There was "very little difference" in rates between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated cattle, he says.
Loneragan says in the studies he's done, E. coli O157:H7 levels were indeed low but dropped lower in meat from vaccinated cattle.
What about the economics?
Which brings up the question of what makes economic sense. Six dollars per head of cattle for a vaccine may not seem like a lot, but cattle go through multiple hands and everyone's got to get paid: the cow-calf operation where they're born and spend their first months of life, the feed lots where they gain their adult weight, the slaughterhouse/packer and the retail store that sells the meat.
The Pfizer vaccine is conditionally approved, meaning companies must still do follow-up and data collection when they use it. That requirement is one of the reasons it's not yet widely used, says Richard Raymond, former USDA undersecretary for food safety. It makes the "vaccine terribly expensive. Government bureaucracy at its worst."
Cargill's Martin says the issue begs the question: "Who's going to bear the cost? Is it going to flow through all the way to the retail consumer level or is it a cost of doing business -- and if so whose margins and profitability does that impact? Anybody who does it and has a higher-cost product is at a competitive disadvantage to anyone who doesn't."
While the idea is good, it just doesn't make economic sense for producers to spend the money, says Bill Marler, the Seattle lawyer who's made a career of prosecuting food-safety cases.
Each year in the United States an estimated 63,000 people get sick from E. coli O157:H7 in food, the CDC says. While not all of those are directly from eating ground beef, contact with cattle manure is also how many fruit and vegetables become contaminated as well. "There's almost always a cow at the end," says Cindy Roberts, a food-safety researcher at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
But overall outbreaks linked to O157:H7 are dropping, and most are never tracked back to the food that caused them. "The chance of getting caught for poisoning people from E. coli is really small, so there's really no incentive" to invest in these preventive steps, says Marler.
How could it be done?
USDA, which is in charge of meat safety, doesn't plan on regulating what ranchers do on the farm. "We really want to make clear that that's not what we're talking about," says Hagen.
So how to make it happen?
On a small scale, the Beef Marketing Group, a cooperative of 14 feed lots in Kansas and Nebraska, has launched a vaccination program in one of its yards and is hoping to expand into others soon, says CEO John Butler.
But for now it's "pure cost" for him. "I get no benefit," Butler says. To really work it's got to happen as an industry, Butler says. "We've really got to throw down the gauntlet and say, 'Who's going to do this first?'"
Out in Meade, Kan., a beef food-safety cooperative named VeriPrime aims to do just that. Its audacious plan, in the works since 2002, is to get the companies that buy meat to sell to Americans to demand these E. coli prevention steps from ranchers and feed lots.
Starting Thursday, VeriPrime is launching a 45-day countdown to get the nation's grocers and restaurants to sign on to its program.
"As cattlemen, we want to implement E. coli prevention," says CEO Scott Crain. "We want to let consumers know it's going to cost a penny a serving and see if that's OK with them. And we're asking the packers, grocery stores and restaurants to collect that penny to reimburse the cattlemen for what it costs."
The cattlemen's cooperative is asking retailers to add a clause to their contracts saying they won't buy beef that hasn't undergone these treatments. And it plans to tell consumers who has signed on.
In the end, it's going to take movement by the biggest companies to move the industry. There are two that could make this happen in a second, McDonald's and Wal-Mart, says Chuck Jolley, a meat industry marketing company executive.
"If either decides to require it, the industry will turn around on a dime," he says.
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