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Boar's Head Plant Tied to 9 Listeria Deaths Had Mold, Flies, and Puddles of Blood
"It shouldn't take people dying for the plant to take food safety issues seriously; USDA is supposed to be there to ensure that that happens," an expert said.
Aug 30, 2024
In the year leading up to a deadly listeria outbreak, the Boar's Head plant where it started had insects on meat, "dirty" machinery, water leaking from pipes and pooling, mold, rancid smells, "heavy meat buildup" on walls, and puddles of blood on the floor, according to United States Department of Agriculture documents released to CBS News.
The deli meat plant in Jarratt, Virginia, which has been temporarily shut down, has been cited for at least 69 instances of noncompliance with federal food safety regulations since August 2023. The listeria outbreak, which is the largest in the U.S. since 2011, has killed nine and caused 57 hospitalizations across many states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Millions of pounds of Boar's Head's products were recalled this summer.
The revelations about conditions at the plant led experts to question the adequacy of the USDA's inspection system.
"We have food safety regulators because we want them to take action before consumers die," Sarah Sorscher, the director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, toldThe Washington Post. "It shouldn't take people dying for the plant to take food safety issues seriously; USDA is supposed to be there to ensure that that happens."
Jerold Mande, a former food safety official at both the USDA and Food and Drug Administration, indicated that the inspection protocol needs updating.
"Most of what they're doing is relying on their sight, smell and other things to detect problems," Mande told the Post. "They could be armed with tools to detect bacteria in real time, but they're not."
U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors turned up dozens of violations at a Boar's Head plant in Virginia now linked to a nationwide recall of deli meats, including mold, mildew and insects repeatedly found throughout the site. https://t.co/N8yTUwF8kL
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 29, 2024
All nine people who have died have been over the age of 70. Listeria is a bacterial illness most dangerous to people who are older, pregnant, or immunocompromised. It kills about 255 people in the U.S. every year—third among food-borne illnesses.
Gunter Morgenstein, an 88-year-old hair stylist in Newport News, Virginia, contracted the disease after eating a Boar's Head liverwurst purchased at Harris Teeter on June 30. The food reminded him of his home country of Germany, which he was forced to flee as a child to escape Nazi rule. He died on July 18 after 10 days in the hospital, The New York Timesreported. The bacteria had reached his brain.
Genome sequencing tests determined in late July that the strain of listeria found at the Boar's Head plant matched the one found in the multi-state outbreak.
Barbara Kowalcyk, a public health and food safety expert based at George Washington University, questioned why the Virginia plant was allowed to continue operating after all of the noncompliance findings.
"The first thing I thought when I read the report is 'Where is the leadership of this establishment and where are the regulators?'" Kowalcyk said. "When you see repeated violations within days and chronically over that length of time, it suggests that their food safety system is not working as intended. Whatever corrective action is being taken is obviously not being integrated into their system."
It's not yet clear what penalties or legal action Boar's Head could face for its role in the outbreak.
CBS News reporter Alexander Tin broke the story about the unsanitary conditions at the Boar's Head plant after receiving the USDA documents following a Freedom of Information Act request. The 69 instances of noncompliance dated from August 1, 2023 until August 2, 2024.
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Report Shows USDA Summer Meals Programs Reach Only Fraction of Kids in Need
"When the school year ends, millions of low-income children lose access to the school meals they depend on," an expert said.
Aug 07, 2024
An advocacy group on Tuesday published a report showing that only a fraction of children who receive free or reduced-price lunches during the school year get such benefits through United States Department of Agriculture programs in the summer, leaving many families with school-age children food insecure.
Only 15.3% of the number of children who receive subsidized school lunches received a summer meal in 2023, the last year for which data was available, the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) report, Hunger Doesn't Take a Vacation, says. The findings highlight the difficulty of reaching children outside of school.
"When the school year ends, millions of low-income children lose access to the school meals they depend on," Kelsey Boone, a FRAC policy analyst and report co-author, told Common Dreams.
The report assesses the 2023 impact of two long-standing USDA programs that were rebranded this year under the name SUN Meals. The USDA also added two new summer meals programs this year, SUN Meals To-Go and SUN Bucks, the latter of which has been the subject of political controversy.
The SUN Bucks program provides a modest $120 per child for the summer to low-income families in electronic benefit transfers (EBTs), similar to the way food stamp money is distributed. The program is administered by states, territories, and tribes and is expected to bring $2.5 billion in grocery benefits to 21 million children this summer.
But it could reach even more children: 13 Republican-controlled states have opted out. They cite reasons including philosophical opposition to "welfare," other summer lunch programs already on offer in their states, and high administrative costs. All of the EBT money comes directly from the federal government, but states are required to pay 50% of the costs of running the program.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom's press office responded to news of the Republican opt-outs by writing on social media earlier this month that "California has fed over 3.2 million kids through summer meal programs while Republican states refuse free federal dollars."
Connecticut State Sen. Bob Duff, a Democrat, responded by writing, "Is being cruel part of the [Republican] party platform?"
In Florida, where the Republican administration opted out of SUN Bucks, families who could have benefited expressed disbelief.
Crystal Ripolio, a woman in Tallahassee who said she struggles to feed her 8-year-old daughter, toldThe Associated Press that her state should offer the same summer meal money that other states do.
"If other states are able to do it, why can't we?" she said, standing outside a food bank that happened to be near Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' official residence in Tallahassee. "That doesn't make sense."
Some Republican-controlled states, such as Louisiana and Nebraska, initially declined to opt in but ultimately decided to do so. States that opted out of SUN Bucks in 2024 may enroll next year.
The USDA's other programs, including those addressed in the new report, face challenges that are not as explicitly political. Though the summer programs did reach 2.8 million children per day in 2023, logistical challenges abound.
"We believe that the low ratio of summer lunch to school year lunch is due to many factors including barriers to participation such as lack of transportation and lack of meal sites in a child's area and high area eligibility thresholds, meaning an open site (a site that serves all children that come to it regardless of income status) must be in an area where 50% or more of the population of children are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch," Boone said.
"It is much easier to access meals when children are already at school," she added.
The FRAC report calls on Congress to allow more communities to offer summer meals and to let more sites operate year-round and provide three meals a day.
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'Groundbreaking' Study Stresses Need to Protect Global Forest Carbon Sink
"Despite facing regional threats like deforestation and wildfires, the world's forests continue to be a powerful weapon in the fight against climate change."
Jul 18, 2024
In what one researcher's group on Thursday hailed as a "groundbreaking" study, scientists from 11 countries highlighted "the critical role of forests in mitigating climate change" and how various threats are imperiling Earth's vital climate sink.
"Despite facing regional threats like deforestation and wildfires, the world's forests continue to be a powerful weapon in the fight against climate change," the U.S. Forest Service (USFS)—which co-led the study published in Nature—said Wednesday in a statement announcing the paper. "These vital ecosystems have consistently absorbed carbon dioxide for the past three decades, even as disruptions chip away at their capacity."
The study shows how the world's forests have consistently absorbed carbon dioxide over the past three decades, "even as disruptions chip away at their capacity."
Researchers examined long-term ground measurements combined with remote sensing data and found that "forests take up an average of 3.5 ± 0.4 billion metric tons of carbon per year, which is nearly half of the carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels between 1990 and 2019."
According to USFS, other key findings from the study include:
- Boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere, spanning regions like Alaska, Canada, and Russia, have experienced a significant decline in their carbon sink capacity, dropping by 36%;
- This decrease is attributed to factors including increased disturbances from wildfires, insect outbreaks, and soil warming;
- Tropical forests have also seen a decline, with deforestation causing a 31% decrease in their ability to absorb carbon;
- Regrowth in previously abandoned agricultural lands and logged areas has partially offset these losses, keeping the net carbon flux in the tropics close to neutral; and
- Temperate forests, on the other hand, have shown a 30% increase in their carbon sink capacity, a rise largely due to extensive reforestation efforts, particularly in China.
"Our research team analyzed data from millions of forest plots around the globe," USFS researcher Yude Pan said in a statement. "What sets this study apart is its foundation in extensive ground measurements—essentially, a tree-by-tree assessment of size, species, and biomass. While the study also incorporates remote sensing data, a common tool in national forest inventories and land surveys, our unique strength lies in the detailed on-the-ground data collection."
The study's other lead author, Richard Birdsey of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, said that "the persistence of the global forest carbon sink was a surprise given global increases in wildfire, drought, logging, and other stressors."
"But it turns out that increasing emissions in some regions were balanced by increasing accumulation in other regions, mainly re-growing tropical forests and reforestation of temperate forests," Birdsey added. "These findings support the potential for improving protection and management of forests as effective natural climate solutions."
The study's recommendations include reducing deforestation, promoting reforestation, and "improving timber harvesting practices to minimize emissions from logging and related activities."
The world lost around 3.7 million hectares of primary tropical forests last year—a rate of approximately 10 soccer fields per minute, according to data from the University of Maryland's Global Land Analysis and Discover Lab. While this marked a 9% reduction in deforestation compared with 2022, the overall deforestation rate is roughly the same as in 2019 and 2021. Felling trees released 2.4 metric gigatons of climate pollution into the atmosphere in 2023, or almost half of all annual U.S. emissions from burning fossil fuels.
In the United States, green groups cautiously welcomed the USFS introduction last month of a draft environmental impact statement for the proposed national old-growth forest plan amendment, which followed President Joe Biden's 2022 directive to protect old-growth forests.
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