Bacteria resurfaces at Toronto meat plant

Traces of bacteria are again found in a Canadian meat packing plant infected in the summer, leading to 20 deaths.

A Maple Leaf Foods employee works to clean equipment at the suspect processing facility in Toronto.

TORONTO // It was Dr Joseph Lister who discovered that swabbing wounds with a solution of carbolic acid (the odour of which we associate with that "hospital smell") dramatically lowered rates of infection. His approach led to the practice of sterile surgery, but he has also lent his name to a more sinister finding, the food pathogen most often found in ill-prepared cheeses: listeria monocytogenes.

This summer, this simple bacteria tainted the production runs of about 220 different prepared meats at a single Maple Leaf Foods Toronto packing plant. The resulting infection, known as listeriosis, killed as many as 20 Canadians, sickened dozens more and sparked the recall of all products from the infected plants. Yesterday, not long after the Toronto plant had reopened, the food-borne bacteria was again found in four meat products. None of the products had been sold as the plant was still under the control of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

Michael McCain, the chief executive officer of Maple Leaf, told Reuters that given listeria exists in all food plants, it was not a surprise that a few cases had been discovered. Because listeria-affected food has no revealing smell or change in appearance, its victims may not know it is at work except for mild, flu-like symptoms such as nausea, fever and a severe headache. Most at risk are pregnant women, children and the elderly. The infection's spread can cause septicaemia, meningitis, endocarditis or pneumonia. There is no vaccine.

The best means of prevention is the scrupulously sterile preparation of surfaces and knives. In the case of Maple Leaf, the villain was the mechanised slicers, which, tainted with the bacteria, spread the bacterium in every production run. Maple Leaf insisted it followed the most "rigorous" of sanitising protocols and that disassembly of the massive machines was considered "outside the scope of anybody's normal, routine consideration for sanitisation". Two other Canadian meatpacking companies use the same machines.

Regardless, Maple Leaf is the target of multiple class action lawsuits, either on behalf of Canadian consumers affected by the outbreak and subsequent recall, or on behalf of businesses that suffered losses of income or reputation. Maple Leaf itself has estimated the plant shutdown and subsequent sterilisation will cost about $20 million Canadian (Dh65.2m). The legal process may prove a great deal more expensive.

It is not the first time that Canada has had to deal with mass infection outbreaks. Sars, the deadly respiratory infection that originated in China and swept through Hong Kong, Singapore and Toronto, caused a deep rethinking of mass infections in Ontario. Some scientists believe that post-Sars strategies may have prevented a far worse outcome of the listeriosis crisis. Even before Sars, Ontario has had more than its share of health and safety crises. In 2000, six people in Walkerton, a small rural town 320km north-west of Toronto, died after consuming water tainted with the E. coli bacteria that had washed down from the farms upstream of the town's water supply.

In the United States, multiple E. coli infections in ground beef have been blamed on "as fast as you can" production pressure and scant federal meat inspection. Eric Schlosser's 2001 best-seller Fast Food Nation investigated the US meatpacking system, decrying the privatisation of the inspection. Paradoxically, there was little new in Schlosser's book, echoing as it did Upton Sinclair's masterpiece of muckraking fiction, The Jungle, which anatomised the horrors of Chicago's meatpacking industry before the First World War.

No one escapes blame in the politics of Canadian food. Both major Canadian political parties had a hand in the listeria outbreak by advocating "rationalising" the number of federal meat inspectors and even "downloading" the inspections to the meatpackers themselves. Food activists, who range from organic farmers to celebrity chefs to culinary tourism specialists - all often better briefed than their government counterparts - may have stumbled upon a strange truth about reforming the country's industrial food practices.

Food safety issues force hard thinking about the role of government in daily life: will there be more or less transparency in the Canadian food industry? Fair Trade coffee advocates changed a global industry in less than a decade. The continued deregulation of Canadian food inspection standards may go the same way. * The National