These things tend to happen when you leave industry to police itself. Oh well!

“We’re beginning to feel that the 2002 guidelines have not been enacted to the maximum,” Dr. Richard A. Raymond, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food safety, said in an interview in Washington.

While noting that the amount of harmful E. coli in beef may be increasing as part of a natural cycle or for other reasons outside the control of the meat industry, Dr. Raymond said that “some of the plants that may have had less-than-stellar systems in place are getting caught.”

Huh. I wonder who was supposed to make sure they did have the right systems in place?

Two years ago, after an 8-year-old girl in Albany County, N.Y., was sickened by Topps ground beef, the Agriculture Department scrutinized the Elizabeth plant and found relatively few problems. But since then, the department said, Topps cut its microbial testing on finished ground beef from once a month to three times a year, a level the department considers inadequate.

Federal investigators said they had recently learned that the company failed to require adequate testing on the raw beef it bought from its domestic suppliers, and it sometimes mixed tested and untested meat in its grinding machines.

The Agriculture Department acknowledged that its safety inspectors, who were in the Topps plant for an hour or two each day, never cited the company for these problems.

I told you before - once Bush took office, the food and drug industry collected on their investments. The USDA and FDA cut staff, virtually brought random inspections to a standstill, and designed a system that leaned almost exclusively on self-reporting.

And they weren’t even subtle.

I spend a few months in 2002 trying to get someone, anywhere, on any major paper to write about this. I was working at an FDA consulting firm and sent extensive FDA documentation - public records - about the new changes to reporters around the country. No one would touch it. Too “complicated.” Not compelling enough.

Your librul media.