Op-Ed: Where's the beef? Perhaps you ate it

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The 1906 release of Upton Sinclare's novel "The Jungle," which showcased the corruption and brutality of the meat packing industry, helped spark the "Progressive movement" and led to the first Federal food safety laws. Since then the US food supply has been among the safest in the world.

But that was before the anti-government regulation crowd stole the 2000 election and put George Bush in the White House. Since then Bush and his cronies have sought to undermine public confidence in government by placing people who were either incompetent or actively hostile to government regulation in charge of regulatory agencies. Since then standards have slipped dramatically.

Last January the Humane Society of the United States released a video that had been shot by undercover operatives showing workers at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Packing Company abusing "downed" cattle by kicking them, jabbing them near their eyes, ramming them with a forklift and shooting high-pressure water up their noses in order to force them to stand up long enough to walk to the slaughter site.

The conclusion of Federal investigators looking into the case is that most of the tainted meat from this, the largest meat recall in US history, has probably already been eaten, some of it in school lunch programs.

Under rules passed almost a hundred years ago this sort of thing should not have been possible since Federal inspectors should have been on-hand to stop it. These rules were not simply some "touchy feely" attempt to make a brutal process seem "nicer." The regulations are designed to prevent the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as "mad cow disease," as well as other diseases.

One of the main reasons it's important to keep "downed cattle" out of the food supply is that they have weaker immune systems which makes them vulnerable to picking up diseases that they can then pass on to humans, particularly since many of them wallow in feces while on the ground.

Normally, federal food inspectors are supposed to monitor the operations to insure that all regulations are being properly applied, but since Bush appointed former Republican Governor and millionaire businessman Ed Schafer as Agriculture Secretary the US has seen a rise in the number of cases of food-related illnesses.

There have been attempts to water down inspections in all areas of food safety including the poultry industry were:

• Workplace safety inspections at poultry plants have dropped to their lowest point in 15 years. The industry has kept steady employment over that time and has leaned heavily on illegal immigrants to fill jobs.

• Fines for serious violations — including conditions that could cause deaths and disabling injuries — are usually cut by more than half from original proposals to an average of about $1,100.

• It has been a decade since OSHA fined a poultry processor for hazards likely to cause carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis and other musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) common to the industry.

• The federal government has made it easier for companies to hide those MSDs. Regulators in 2002 lifted a record-keeping requirement that required companies to identify injuries associated with repetitive trauma.

In addition to tainted beef and poultry, salmonella-tainted vegetables have shown up in our supermarkets and in our headlines on several occasions in recent years. All of this sort of thing can be traced back to relaxed regulations.

But the food industry is not the only sector where the mania for deregulation has harmed the US consumer. There have been several well publicized recalls of products imported from China that should have been prevented by Federal inspectors at our borders.

US Navy pilots have a saying to the effect that every safety regulation on the books is written in blood, meaning that someone probably had to die before a rule to prevent that sort of behavior was put into effect. No illnesses connected to the tainted beef that entered our food supply have turned up--so far. Let us hope that Americans who ate this tainted beef do not have to pay in their blood in order to remind us why food safety regulations were written in the first place.