While no one industry is guiltier than another for recalling product, the food and pharmaceutical industries are not only the most notorious and memorable, but also the most wide-ranging and criticized. This year, as a matter of fact, the list ranges from shell eggs to pet feed to baby formula to black pepper to spinach to ice cream to Lipitor to Tylenol ... and that's not the half of it.
According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths occur annually in the United States as a result of food-borne illness, and these amounts continue to escalate, along with pharmaceutical-related recalls. One would think because these industries are becoming increasingly modernized with automation and sanitary technology that the problem of recalls would be waning. This is not the case ... So let's go through a couple of product categories that were hit especially hard this year by the dissemination of the news that product was contaminated, and unearth some ways in which these food and pharma snafus could have been prevented.
Food Contamination: The Wrongs of Wright County, SanGar & More
By Carrie Ellis, Editor
The connection between the two farms is that Wright County Egg supplied chickens and feed to Hillandale Farms, though samples of salmonella were found in the environment at both locations. Hillandale recalled approximately 170 million eggs, whereas Wright County recalled 380 million. After as many as 1,500 cases of salmonella poisoning reported, neither of the companies was permitted to sell shell eggs, unless they were sent to breaker facilities where the eggs could be pasteurized to kill any present salmonella.
As reported on KTLA.com, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors attributed the salmonella to:
* Live rodents and mice in laying houses at both farms.
* Structural damage and holes in many locations at both farms, allowing wildlife access.
* Escaped chickens tracking manure through the houses.
* Employees not changing clothing properly when moving from one location to another and not sanitizing equipment properly.
* "Live flies too numerous to count" on egg belts, in the feed and on the eggs themselves at Wright County Egg.
* Dead and live maggots "too numerous to count" on the manure pit floor in one location at Wright County Egg.
* Manure piled 4 to 8 feet high in five locations at Wright County Egg, leaning against and …
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