Consumer groups
Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety have petitioned the Food and Drug
Administration
(FDA) to ban
irradiated ground beef. Included in their petition were the results of recent
lab tests conducted at their
request that
detected chemicals linked to cancer promotion and genetic damage in irradiated
ground beef sold at a
restaurant and
three grocery stores. The test findings are contained in a report released last
week entitled “What’s in
the
Beef?” This marks the first time since the FDA began regulating irradiated
foods in 1958 that the agency has been
petitioned to
ban an irradiated food product. Legalized in 1997, irradiated ground beef is
reportedly on sale at more than
5,000 grocery
stores and restaurants in the United States. The federal government recently
lifted its ban on serving
irradiated
hamburgers to schoolchildren. “If you’re going to permit irradiated meat
on grocery store shelves and school
lunch trays, you
need to be certain that the product is safe - and no study has been able to
adequately demonstrate that
long-term health
won’t be affected,” said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen’s
critical mass energy and environment
program.
The two groups reportedly purchased and tested three types of irradiated
ground beef. Samples of fresh
ground beef and
cooked ground beef were irradiated with an electron-beam irradiator by food
technology firm SureBeam,
while frozen
ground beef patties were irradiated with a gamma-ray irradiator by Food
Technology Service. According to
the
organizations, all three types of irradiated ground beef tested positive for
2-alkylcyclobutanones, or 2-ACBs, which
are formed when
commonly occurring fats are exposed to radiation. Both claim that these
chemicals have never been
detected in any
non-irradiated foods. Recent experiments funded by the EU determined that 2-ACBs
promoted the
growth of colon
tumors in rats and caused genetic damage in human cells. In addition to raw and
cooked ground beef,
2-ACBs have been
detected in other foods that the FDA has legalized for irradiation, including
chicken, eggs and
mangoes.
“Consumption of an improper diet, together with food that contains 2-ACBs, which
act as a tumor promoter,
can increase the
risk for the development of colon cancer,” said Professor William Au of the
department of preventive
medicine at the
University of Texas. “Without a systematic investigation in the population, this
serious concern has not
been addressed
yet.” However, this view is not shared by everyone. Advocates of irradiation
claim that the process
makes food safer
by elminating harmful bacteria. “Dangerous substances do not appear in foods
when irradiated as
approved,” says
a statement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Surebeam’s
website. The Grocery
Manufacturing
Association’s director of scientific and nutrition policy, Lisa Katic, also
believes that fears over irradiation
are overplayed.
“Acceptance of milk pasteurization was long delayed because of fear mongering
and misinformation,”
she said. “We
should not let that happen with food irradiation.”
According to a
report in The Guardian, scientists in the United Kingdom are considering
new checks on bovine spongiform
encephalopathy
(BSE) after an unexpected rise in cases among animals supposedly free from
infection. Strict rules
banning the use
of meat and bone meal in feed to ruminants were meant to eventually eradicate
the disease, which has
still
unquantified consequences for human health. However, the growing number of
cattle succumbing to the disease
even though they
were born after the August 1996 watershed for feed rules in Britain is troubling
experts. It may delay
any decision on
whether to relax another 1996 ban on cattle meat from British animals over 30
months old being used
in food.
Although the youngest cattle with BSE are more than four years old it is feared
there may be a hidden route of
infection,
meaning the disease may hang on in the national herd for years. Scientists
suspect that contaminated
imports brought
into Britain before Europe-wide controls were introduced in January 2001 may be
a factor. There is no
evidence that
very old feed stocks on British farms dating from the 80s or 90s have any role,
but there is a growing belief
that detailed
investigation is needed into other possible causes, including unexplained
transmission from cow to cow or
long-term
contamination in soil. The original cause of BSE has never been established and
is unlikely to be, although
the main
favorites have been that sheep scrapie, a disease apparently less dangerous to
humans, was transformed into
a killer in
cattle, or that BSE was a once rare sporadic condition in cattle that spread.
Feed recycling was the principal
cause for the
speed at which the epidemic spiralled out of control until the early 1990s.
There were 36,700 cases in
1992, compared
with just over 500 so far this year. Feed rules were introduced in 1988, but the
long incubation period
of the disease,
often four to five years or more, meant they took a long time to have an effect.
In addition, the rules were
not strictly
enforced until months after the first cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
(vCJD) were recognized in
early 1996.
There have been 77 confirmed BSE cases in the UK where the animals were born
after August 1996, 49 of
them in the past
12 months, 8 in the past three weeks. Other European countries have more BSE
cattle born after
1996, but their
outbreaks have never come close to matching the scale of Britain’s, with well
over 180,000 cases since
1986. They also
conduct far more tests than Britain because there is no age limit on meat that
can be used in food. A
paper to be
considered by the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) indicates
that feed contamination
is the most
“plausible” option, since trading of mammalian meat and bone meal was legal in
continental Europe until the
start of 2001,
but because of incubation times, it could be another 3-4 years before any
consequences are seen.