Unforseeable outlier or epic public safety fail? That’s the question on many consumers’ nervous lips in the wake of last week’s hepatitis A outbreak among people believed to have eaten brands of Patties Foods frozen raspberries grown and packed in China.
The suspected food contamination is still being investigated, with results probably weeks away. Yet amid the clamour as new cases were reported almost daily and pressure for a political response mounted, the public policy response remains opaque.
Food safety and agricultural experts are surprisingly polarised about whether this incident, if confirmed, is a rare breach of functional food safety laws or the tip of an iceberg which proves industrial practices and a globalised food chain have moved beyond the scope of the current regime.
Several critics fear it may be a harbinger of worse things to come, with Australian standards at risk from recently signed free trade agreements (FTAs) with China, Korea and the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being thrashed out with the United States and 11 other countries in the region.
Others suggest such fears are scaremongering. “We don’t want to exaggerate the issue and have the consumer panicking about what they are eating,” says Dr Said Ajlouni, a senior lecturer in food science at the University of Melbourne. The key, he says, is to investigate what or who contributed to the outbreak and what action can be taken to avoid such incidents from happening again. “Everything is possible … but it is better to be positive than negative.”
For some experts, the glass is half full, for others, half empty. For consumers, the question remains: glass of what exactly?
Food safety expert at Swinburne University Professor Enzo Palombo believes an occasional disease outbreak is a manageable risk of our globalised food chain, a drawback to be balanced against the benefits of year-round and affordable fresh food, no matter the season.
To stop eating imports after this week’s hepatitis A event would be like refusing to “fly around the world because we [might] catch Ebola,” he says.
There is always a small risk in anything we eat, the microbiologist says, but ready-to-eat food that is not heated before consuming (from dairy or processed meats to pre-packaged fruit or vegetable salads) is at a slightly higher risk of harbouring microbiological contaminants – hence occasional recalls after illnesses associated with locally produced salami, or mayonnaise made with raw eggs.
Personal food safety habits could also be improved, Palombo argues, particularly hand-washing before preparing or eating food. “People think it’s what you’ve brought into the house, but it might be you and your practices that contaminate food,” he says.
“I don’t believe that it’s our inherent testing practices at fault – it’s that it is simply a numbers game.”
Associate professor Tom Ross, a microbiologist at the University of Tasmania, agrees.
For practical reasons, you can’t test every sample of every food that comes into the country – and even if you could, hepatitis A might not show up, he says.
No simple test for hepatitis A exists, and it can be statistically easy to miss unless the contamination of a foodstuff is severe: viruses are tiny and not uniformly dispersed throughout a foodstuff in the way chemical pollution, for example, would be, so sampling can be unreliable.
The answer to preventing such incidents is not increasing testing regimes. Its to ensure contamination doesn’t happen in the first place, including helping producers in regions with compromised sanitation establish hygiene procedures, with inspections to ensure they are maintained, he says, pointing to a successful program involving South American exporters to the US.
How trading agreements improve or undermine food safety has been a vexed issue this week. While some commentators are concerned FTAs might weaken Australia’s ability to maintain its own safety standards, Ross points to World Trade Organisation rules in which a country has the right to reject imports if they do not meet their required food safety standards. “But it has to be the same for local and imported products,” he says.
David Adamson, a senior researcher in the University of Queensland school of economics, isn’t so relaxed. He is concerned about the role FTAs can play in lowering food safety around the globe, advantaging dominant players and removing countries’ ability to use food scares elsewhere to gain a competitive advantage, such as happened for Australian cattle farmers after bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or “mad cow disease”) was detected in a small number of US cows in 2003 and its number one export market, Japan, stopped US imports. “We make a lot of money when things go wrong for our competitors,” Adamson says.
The agricultural economist is critical of the secrecy surrounding free trade negotiations, arguing that excluding the public means “[the] government may accidentally fail to understand all the issues at play, such as changes in the way food is produced.”
It also means the public is prevented from debating what’s being traded away, with potential harms to public health as well as trade. He says we could be strong-armed, for example, into adopting the US practice of using the same antibiotics for humans and animals in health and food production applications, increasing disease mutation and antibiotic resistance in both populations, citing 2013 evidence from the Australian Antimicrobial Resistance Standing Committee.
It’s not just medicines either; business harmonisation rules could lead to Australia being forced to adopt US regulations regarding livestock foods that include products like blood waste and “poultry waste,” which Adamson describes as “the shit that falls out of the bottom of cages” – and that includes dead chickens.
“This has major implications,” he says, recalling how the origins of BSE occurred when cattle (naturally herbivores) were fed with products derived from dead cows, with the disease transferable to humans who consume infected beef.
Other sceptics say the undermining of robust food safety standards is not just a looming FTA problem – it is right here, right now.
Chris Baker, a research analyst for the Centre for International Security Studies at Sydney University, argues our national food safety standards have already been hopelessly eroded by the speed of change to the global supply chain.
He points out our feverish attention to microbiological contamination – listeria, E. coli and salmonella as well as this week’s furore about hepatitis A – is partly because these ill effects show up within days or weeks. Contamination from heavy metals and other industrial pollutants may take years, even decades to develop – but be far more deadly.
“The effects from lead and cadmium are long term, they build up over years and destroy your liver and kidneys,” he says. “And our testing for that is, quite frankly, pathetic.”
He points to Department of Agriculture reports on inspections of imported food. In the first half of 2013, of 45,204 tests undertaken, only nine were for the presence of lead (all were compliant) and 290 for the presence of cadmium (only one failed the compliance test). In the period since, no testing of imported food for either of these elements has been undertaken.
A DoA spokesperson says tests for the presence of lead and cadmium ceased following an internal risk assessment review.
Yet in much of Asia, and China in particular, the air, soil and rivers are severely polluted, a byproduct of its rapid industrialisation over the past 30 years, Baker says. He cites figures from China’s National Marine Environmental Monitoring Centre showing that in 2012,about 17 million tonnes of pollutants contaminated 72 of China’s rivers, including 46,000 tonnes of heavy metals such as lead and cadmium; 3.3 million hectares of agricultural land is moderately or severely polluted, according to China’s Vice-Minister for Land and Resources.
“We are importing that pollution through the food that we eat,” Baker says. “That doesn’t mean all that food is poisoned – but it means we just can’t know.” He personally tries to avoid buying fruit and vegetables from overseas in any form – fresh, canned, frozen or processed.
“It took some time for procedures to catch up with things like toys and electronics – we had to chase lead on toys coming in from China for example.” Baker says. “What’s happening now with food, especially with FTAs [and] the even faster transfer of these goods, is that we’re just not keeping up with it.”
“It’s expensive, it’s tricky, it’s random, there is so much there. It would be very interesting to have a week or two where the government tests everything and see what comes out of it. It may not be nearly as bad as what we think – but it may be.
“The real thing is that we don’t know.”
ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU SICK
Recent global food safety and supply chain scares
2015 – Berries link to Hep A
Local manufacturer Patties Foods recalls some Creative Gourmet and Nanna’s brands of Mixed Berries and Frozen Raspberries after the contents, grown and packaged in China, correlate with more than a dozen incidences of Hepatitis A across Australia. The Red Cross imposes a two-month ban on donation of blood by anyone who has eaten the berries. Law firm Slater and Gordon start collecting evidence for a possible class action.
2014 – Bad meat scandal
Expired and rotten meat was mixed with fresh meat and supplied to global brands including McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut by US-owned Chinese supplier Shanghai Husi Food. The “fake and inferior” ingredients, exposed by a Chinese television show, were used in products sold in China and Japan. No illnesses were officially recorded but Yum Brands, owner of KFC and Pizza Hut, saw its Chinese sales and share price slump in the immediate aftermath.
2013 – Horsemeat burgers
Burgers marketed as beef by supermarkets in Britain and Ireland were revealed to contain horsemeat. While a food fraud rather than safety scandal, it revealed a major breakdown in the traceability of the supply chain. An independent report in September 2014 found many areas of meat manufacturing had a high risk of fraud and low risk of detection, and Britain lagged behind other EU countries in terms of food crime funding and investigation units. It also showed that organised crime had entered the food sector elsewhere in Europe.
2009 – “Dangerous” soy milk
Bonsoy soy milk was recalled across Australia after it was found to contain 1000 times more iodine than rival brands and scores of people suffered thyroid-related illness. In 2014, a class action suit against the manufacturer, exporter and distributor resulted in a record $25 million settlement to compensate victims who said they suffered serious health side-effects.
2008 – Adulterated infant formula
Melamine-contaminated Sanlu infant formula distributed in China killed at least six children and sickened 300,000 others. The melamine was added to increase the products’ protein readings despite the industrial ingredient’s toxicity; concealment of the tainted product was reportedly aided by government regulators and Chinese media. Babies began falling sick with kidney problems in 2007, and Sanlu’s tests confirmed melamine poisoning within months, but the problem was not made public until the New Zealand government informed the Beijing authorities in 2008 (Fonterra, a New Zealand firm, owned a stake in Sanlu).