WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--When workers at a Nebraska beef packing plant inadvertantly sprayed waste water on 493 carcasses, the company should not have been allowed to clean and treat the meat and allow it to enter the food supply, a non-profit consumer group said Thursday.
U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman Steven Cohen said that the meat would normally be deemed "contaminated," but in this situation company officials at Swift & Company convinced government inspectors they could make the beef "safe and wholesome again" through "approved treatment and microbiological testing."
Swift officials were not available for immediate comment.
Cohen said the company cut off the external surfaces of the carcasses that came into contact with the waste water and treated the remaining beef before testing it for E. coli, salmonella and other bacterias.
The nonprofit consumer group Food & Water Watch said in a letter to USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety Richard Raymond that no ammount of treatment should be considered sufficient.
That, the group said, is because the waste water sprayed on the carcasses contained "filth previously collected in the drains on its kill floor" which likely contained "fecal material."
USDA's Cohen said it was indeed waste water sprayed on the carcasses - as a result of a defective "backflow mechanism" - but USDA inspectors oversaw the treatment of meat and the sample testing and were convinced it was safe for people to eat.
"We had control from the beginning to the end," Cohen said.
But Felicia Nestor, a spokeswoman for Food & Water Watch, said the group was not satisfied.
"Even if there were absolute certainty that this product was safe," the group said in the letter dated Nov. 30, "this is a circumstance in which product adulteration is so extensive and offensive that allowing companies to salvage and sell it to unsuspecting consumers is unreasonable."
Source: Bill Tomson; Dow Jones Newswires; 202-646-0088; bill.tomson@dowjones.com