The Unanswered Questions In Listeria Outbreak Gets Canadian Food Inspection Agency Award Nomination
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is in the running as one of the nominees for the prestigious Code of Silence award, recognizing the most secretive government, department or agency in Canada. The award is made by Canadian Association of Journalists and the winner will be made at Saturday in Vancouver at CAJ's annual gala. The Association has 1,300 members from across Canada.
The CFIA was nominated for the award, according to CAJ, because:
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency for dramatic delays and extensions on requests related to the listeria outbreak that killed 22 Canadians and triggered hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of illnesses. Requests filed for inspections records on the Toronto-area Maple Leaf plant at the centre of the outbreak took nine months to produce, and communication records with the company are still embroiled in delays. For one of the biggest public health issues to face Canada in recent years, details behind the cause of the outbreak, the apparent delay in warning Canadians and the agency's handling of the aftermath remain filled with unanswered questions.
CFIA is up against some tough competition for the award, including what CAJ calls the "spin machine" of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. We won't be there, but will attempt to bring you a report on who wins.
I can understand why 22 people died in Canada from eating food that came from a Federal Inspected Meat packing plant in Canada.I worked in one for forty years and I saw tons of meat that was allowed to sit on warm rails in the plant that I worked in .The meat was to go into a smoke house or a cooler within two hours but to save the packing house money they stored the meat on old rails in the plant and some of the meat was stored in the warm for twelve hours and the temperature of that meat was 60 degrees instead of 38 degrees.I emailed Steven Harper and Dion about it in 2006 and there was no reply and I emailed the new Liberal leader Miky in 2009 and there was no reply. The inspecter in that plant said he sent a letter to the Canadian Goverment and he got no relpy.I have proof of my statemets and I can prove it.We are ginny pigs for these two Gov. parties.How many more people are going to die before we kick the two of them out.The plant that I worked in was self regulated and the inspecters were in about once a week for about one hour and they had to leave to spend an hour some where else.Supporting a Liberal or Conservitive gov. is deadly.Please tell them to put the proper amount of inspecters back in the meat packing plants.It is your life. Gary Baggey.
I can tell you another thing that makes me think about buying food any where now is the low wages that are paid to workers they then selves are in a state of poverty some of them have two or three jobs to servive. When you have to work all of those jobs to live you are tired and when they get to work they do not care.Since I have been retired one worker in the plant told me that Steven Harper has increased the compliance from two to three hours so now he can honestly say that they are closer to the compliance.
The greed facter is dangerass because I was told that in that plant now when people phone in sick they do not call in workers and they push the people to do more on regular time so they can save on over time. Self regulation is a bad move because the Gov. has told the federall inspected meat packers to send in a peice of paper every so often and as long as there are no deaths we do not care about the mess of the plants.When I started there there were lots of inspecters at that plant and we produced 500 lbs per man hour when I retired from that plant we were producing 3000 lbs per man hour and the feds might spend no more than an hour or two there a week there.
When you are producing that kind of volume is there any season for that kind of nonesence. Gary Baggey.
Let me explain the safety net about the awfull goverment inspection rules.Rule No.1 when the meat has been in the warm for more then two hours the company has to pay for a lab test that I understand that it cost the company four hundred dollars per lab test to make sure that the bacteria levels are excetpable for human consumtion and rule No 2 they have to cook the product at a higher temperature to burn off the extra bacteria that was caused becuase of the heat rise in the warm area. If the companies would design the plant properly in the fisrt place they would not have to go through all of that trouble.The plant that I work in had lots of coolers
but it would have cost a little bit of money to use the coolers because they would have had to install a few rails and they would have had to pay some body to mave the meat back in forth so they were happy letting the bacteria double every two hours until we could get it in the smokehouse to start that proccess.Gary Baggey