The Contamination of Meat in the USand the Free Trade Agreement

The big livestock slaughterhouses and the poultry industry in the United States have relaxed the health standards by which they are run.

This has to do with a large economic concentration in the food industry, which has enough lobbying ability in the North American Congress to weaken the entities that regulate it, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, when it doesn’t take them over completely. Mad cow disease and the frequent outbreaks of disease and deaths associated with consumption of meat contaminated with E. coli 0157:h7 and strains of Salmonella, both resistant to antibiotics, have not been preventable or avoidable because regulators cannot count on the legislative power that would otherwise permit them to close facilities jeopardized by deplorable sanitary conditions.

Another factor that explains the contamination of beef is related to a feeding process based on corn extracts, which benefit from huge federal subsidies that make them substantially cheaper. As cattle are a species of herbivore, the change in feed gives rise to an environment that enables the proliferation of E. coli. If they were even partially fed with grass, the incidence of these bacteria would be reduced considerably. Slaughterhouses do not do the necessary cleaning for the waste of livestock processed in stalls, which frequently ends up contaminating the meat resulting from this process, especially ground hamburger meat.

Something similar is happening with the poultry industry, which also records frequent poisoning of consumers with variants of Salmonella: The animals are heaped up in very narrow cages and the ones who die are not removed before they begin to decompose. Given the great magnitude of this processing chain, the poisoning is frequent.

The diet of the lower-middle class and the poor in the United States is disastrous, based on junk food: hamburgers, French fries and sweetened sodas, beers, cheap, corn-based desserts and meats combined with soy. One-third of the population and one half of ethnic minorities are obese and the majority ends up with diabetes, turning this illness into a true epidemic.

All of these facts are recorded in a documentary produced in 2008, called “Food, Inc.”, which tells the story of a two-year-old boy who died in Minnesota a decade ago, due to E. coli 0157:H7 poisoning. His mother filed a lawsuit, but the plant that produced the contaminated meat was never penalized. Confronted with the deaf ears of regulatory institutions, Kevin’s mother became an activist for the cause of a healthy North American diet. A bill named “Kevin’s Law,” in honor of the deceased child, gives teeth to the USDA and the FDA, enabling them to defend consumers from big corporations. But to date, it has not been passed by the United States Congress.

With the Free Trade Agreement between Colombia and the United States on its way, and with some “strict” pesticide standards that they are placing on importations of foods into that country, it is very important that the Colombian health authorities know how to defend us from deadly bacteria that come contained in its exports of meat and, furthermore, to promote a healthy diet for the population.