CBS News – In the year leading up to a deadly listeria outbreak now traced back to recalled Boar’s Head deli meats, U.S. Department of Agriculture records show that Biden administration officials quietly made significant cuts to planned testing for germs across America’s food supply.
The department says the cuts did not translate to significantly fewer tests at the now-shuttered Boar’s Head plant in Jarratt, Virginia, that’s been blamed for the outbreak.
Other Boar’s Head plants are also now under law enforcement investigation, CBS News reported Thursday, and federal food safety officials have pledged a “top-to-bottom review” of what went wrong leading up to the outbreak linked to at least 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.
The Biden administration has not provided an explanation for the decision to make the changes.
And questions are now being raised about why the Boar’s Head plant’s years of violations didn’t spur regulators to reverse course, do more testing and step up federal scrutiny.
The Consumer Federation of America helms a coalition of nonprofit groups that advocates for food safety and meets monthly with Biden administration officials on these issues, including in recent weeks following the Boar’s Head outbreak.
The federal Food Safety and Inspection Service has limited resources from Congress relative to the scale of testing done by the private sectors.
The agency has also faced “continuing difficulty” with recruitment and retention for its food safety inspectors, as it competes with the private sector for personnel.
Federal oversight is one important way to push producers — and the retailers they serve — to test more aggressively between inspections, Gremillion said …
