Afewgoodwomen

The Global Failure To Disclose Carcinogenic Contaminants In Bottled Drinks Sold To Children

Ross E. Getman, Esq. DC and NYS bars (email)

A few good women protect our food / They help FDA find chemicals in our groceries; [3 STAR Edition]

LAURAN NEERGAARD. Houston Chronicle. Houston, Tex.: Aug 13, 2003. pg. 9

Inside the lab, giant blenders grind foods into mush to be tested for more than 300 pesticides, cancer-causing dioxins, toxic metals such as mercury, and industrial chemicals. This year, for the first time, FDA also is hunting acrylamide, a possibly cancer-causing chemical formed by high-temperature cooking.

The pesticide DDT: Banned here in 1972 but still used in parts of the world and persistent in U.S. soil, DDT still is found in tiny amounts in 23 percent of foods FDA tests for pesticide residue.

The insecticide methyl chlorpyrifos: Exposure has jumped since the 1980s. Levels rarely exceed 0.05 part per million, but in 2001 FDA discovered teething biscuits containing twice as much. That was still well below the safety limit of 6 ppm for wheat-containing foods, but the teething biscuits were supposed to be organic.

Full Text (883 words)

BELTON, Mo.- Thirteen cooks bustle in a steam-filled church kitchen, filleting catfish, frying lamb chops and roasting eggplant - 250 pounds of food, all bought with federal tax dollars.

Despite tantalizing smells, nobody gets to eat these meals: Food and Drug Administration scientists pull them apart, hunting for contaminants lurking in the food supply and counting nutrients.

The backbone of the nation's patchwork food safety system, this massive yet little-known program monitors Americans' favorite menu items - from Oreo cookies to tuna casserole, Budweiser to home- brewed tea - for chemicals, bad and good.

And it hinges largely on one group of retired women, many in their 70s and 80s, who gather in the tiny basement kitchen of Belton United Methodist Church on 16 Friday mornings a year to whip up feasts that land in test tubes.

"Bacon, hot bacon," comes the warning cry, and Margaret Kershaw sidesteps the sizzling tray. She deftly cuts squishy beef livers and drops them into pans of oil, an apron catching spatters. "Sometimes you think to yourself, `Well, this is a waste of food,' " says Kershaw, a retired nurse. "`Why do they need all those pans of bacon?' . . . But with all the tests they do, I guess they need that much."

The volunteer chefs precisely follow FDA's recipes, carefully mixing ingredients bought in different cities for a nationally representative sample of meals.

"It's painting a picture of the American diet," explains chemist Chris Sack, pesticide chief for FDA's Total Diet Study.

To ensure food safety, a hodgepodge of government agencies mostly monitors fields, factories and ports for law-breakers. When the Environmental Protection Agency checks pesticide levels, for instance, it tests a watermelon's rind to see if farmers sprayed the right amount.

But people don't eat the rind.

In contrast, the Total Diet Study measures what contaminants consumers actually absorb - levels about 1/20th of what other food- monitoring programs can detect - both from packaged foods and after washing produce, mixing ingredients and properly cooking meals.

The monitoring helps health officials spot when changes in food production or the environment affect food quality, so they can launch medical research, alter regulations or recall a brand.

Bad contamination is rare. But it happens.

A pesticide sprayer was jailed after FDA discovered he used an illegal bug killer on 19 million bushels of oats headed for top- selling breakfast cereals.

Baby-food carrots were recalled because they absorbed lead while growing in an apple orchard, where a lead-based fruit pesticide had years earlier seeped into the soil.

And ever wonder why cereal always comes in plastic bags inside the box? This testing once uncovered cancer-causing PCBs leaching into cereal through the recycled paper in its box.

So far this year, FDA has discovered traces of illegal pesticides on some grapefruit, tomatoes and collard greens, a mystery yet to be solved.

Now the World Health Organization is urging other countries to adopt FDA-style testing so they can better target scarce resources to improve food safety. A priority: tracking so-called "persistent organic pollutants," such as the widely banned pesticide DDT, that linger in the environment for decades.

What started 40 years ago as checking a few foods for fallout from nuclear testing today is a $5 million canvassing of the food supply.

Four times a year, FDA employees enter grocery stores in three cities with identical lists so long - nine dozen eggs, six pounds of bacon, gallons of soda, cases of baby food - they can spend $3,000 per city.

Purchases are quick-shipped to an FDA laboratory in Lenexa, Kan., where workers send ingredients for cooking to the nearby Belton church ladies.

POLLUTANT TYPES

Some examples of pollutants the Food and Drug Administration measures in the Total Diet Study:

The pesticide DDT: Banned here in 1972 but still used in parts of the world and persistent in U.S. soil, DDT still is found in tiny amounts in 23 percent of foods FDA tests for pesticide residue.

Volatile organic compounds: These chemicals, which include solvents and combustion byproducts, migrate into foods from processing or environmental exposure. Most commonly found are toluene, in foods such as cheeses, meats, peanut butter and chocolate, and benzene, in foods such as ground beef, bananas and diet colas. Although there aren't set safety limits for most foods, a spike prompts investigation.

Lead: Food exposure has plummeted since lead solder in cans began disappearing in the 1970s.

[Illustration]

Photo: 1. Betty Robertson of Belton, Mo., keeps an eye on food cooking in the basement kitchen of a church. Volunteers cook the food, which is then taken to an FDA lab in Lenexa, Kan., for tests; Graph: 2. POLLUTANT TYPES (TEXT)