UPDATED 3:40 p.m. ET: The Vermont Department of Health says 10 people in the state have become sick from ground beef being recalled by Cargill Beef. 

The 10 became sick between June 6 and June 26. Three were hospitalized and all have recovered, according to health officials.

Original story:

SCARBOROUGH, Maine -- Hannaford Supermarkets is alerting consumers that Cargill Beef is voluntarily recalling 29,339 pounds of ground beef that may contain salmonella.

The 85-percent-lean ground beef was produced at Cargill's plant in Wyalusing, Pa., on May 25, and repackaged for sale to consumers by customers of the Kansas-based company.

Cargill President John Keating says in a statement, "Food-borne illnesses are unfortunate and we are sorry for anyone who became sick from eating ground beef we may have produced."

Hannaford's says consumers should check their ground beef for "use or sell by" dates between May 29 and June 16. Refunds will be offered for ground beef with those dates that is returned.

Additional information is available at the U.S. Department of Agriculture recall website at: www.fsis.usda.gov/FSIS_Recalls/index.asp 

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It sounds like a fine idea: "Good Laboratory Practice." But critics say that reliance on this standard of scientific test by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has allowed dangerous chemicals to be used in foods and food packaging.

The nonprofit group 100 Reporters has this interesting story, Good Practice v. Good Science, researched and written by Clare Howard.

An excerpt:

In a recent decision to permit continued use of a chemical in food packaging that research has tied to cancer, diabetes, miscarriages and developmental delays in children, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has favored two industry-funded studies over more than 1,000 independent analyses finding the chemical poses serious risks to human health.

The FDA’s decision on bisphenol A was not an isolated, or even unusual, call. For more than 30 years, U.S. regulatory agencies have relied on an arcane rule for approving chemicals used in everything from food packaging and drugs to pesticides and electronics, one that favors industry-funded reports over independent academic research.

That process exalts studies that follow design standards known as “Good Laboratory Practice,” and discounts research that may be confirmed through peer review, but do not follow the GLP protocols. Favoring GLP has given a green light to hundreds of chemicals and products from nicotine to atrazine linked to human disease and chronic health conditions.

Critics contend that the protocols, defended by the chemical industry, have become an arbitrary barrier, shutting out important independent research. In the case of BPA, a common chemical used in food packaging, adherence to the protocol largely overrode studies linking BPA to breast cancer, prostate abnormalities, low sperm count, developmental disorders, heart disease, obesity and diabetes.

Read the full story at 100 Reporters.

Dozens of Kansas high school students and chaperones were being treated for symptoms of food poisoning Wednesday at a hospital in Mount Pleasant, Pa., after a band trip to New York, the hospital said.

About 160 students and chaperones made the trip on three buses to New York from De Soto High School, just across the Kansas border from Kansas City, Mo. They were returning home Wednesday morning when about 40 students, ages 13 to 18, and 10 adults fell ill.

The students and chaperones were being treated at Excela Frick Hospital in Mount Pleasant, about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, NBC station WPXI of Pittsburgh reported. The Pennsylvania and New York state health departments were both investigating because the members of the caravan became ill after having eaten at an Italian restaurant in New York City on Tuesday evening.

"The common factor seems to be the chicken Parmesan," Alvie Cater, a spokesman for the De Soto School District, told the Kansas City Star.

"Roughly 25 were treated at the hospital, but more than that actually displayed symptoms," Cater said. "We're looking at up to 50 that displayed symptoms, but some of them were not severe at all."

The hospital said most of the victims were treated for severe dehydration and were expected to be back on the road later Wednesday.

NBC station WPXI of Pittsburgh contributed to this report by M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

Related: 

• Months later, deaths from cantaloupe outbreak continue to climb
• E. coli-tainted venison kabobs sicken Minn. students
• 19 sickened by ground beef from Maine grocery chain

Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP, file

White-tailed deer similar to this one were the source of an odd outbreak of E. coli food poisoning among students in a Minnesota high school science class.

A Minnesota high school science project that involved hunting and butchering deer -- including one road-kill capture -- and turning the meat into venison kabobs backfired when 29 students were sickened with a rare kind of E. coli food poisoning, investigators say.

The 2010 incident just now reported in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases highlights the risks of E. coli contamination, not just from factory-produced meat, but also from small, local providers.

Doctors first knew they had a problem in December 2010 when two kids from the same high school turned up at a Minnesota hospital with abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. Fearing they had a food poisoning outbreak on their hands, they quickly called in the state’s top-notch public health officials.

Both teens had taken part in a school environmental science and outdoor recreation class that involving hunting, shooting and butchering six white-tailed deer, explained Joshua Rounds, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Public Health. A seventh deer was harvested after being hit by a car, the report says.

The deer were processed on school grounds and then grilled and eaten in class a few weeks before the students got sick.

Epidemiologists interviewed 117 kids in five class periods and found that 29 definitely had become ill, but not with E. coli O157:H7, the strain commonly associated with food poisoning from ground beef.

Rounds suspected the deer might have carried another E. coli strain that also produces poisons known as Shiga toxins. He was right. Samples from the students and the deer meet turned up E. coli O103:H2, which is part of a larger category of non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bugs, known as STECs.

Scientists also turned up another E. coli strain, E. coli O145:NM that didn’t produce Shiga toxins.

STECs are becoming a more worrisome form of E. coli, so much so that federal agriculture officials are poised to begin banning six strains of the possibly lethal bacteria from some forms of beef in the nation’s food supply starting next spring.

Under the new regulations, the bacteria will be considered adulterants and it will be illegal to sell beef contaminated with the bacteria collectively dubbed “the big six,” including Shiga-toxin producing E. coli O103 and O145.

In the case of the Minnesota deer hunters, the source of the problem was clear.

People don’t usually get sick from eating hunks or steaks of muscle meat, Rounds said. In this case, however, the meat had been skewered and cooked only to medium rare. The skewers had dragged contaminants from the meat’s surface down to the center of the kabobs, which hadn’t been cooked to a high enough temperature to kill the bacteria.

Unless the entire hunk of meat is cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, there’s a risk of food poisoning, Rounds said.

Another factor was hand-washing when handling meat -- or the lack of it, Rounds said.

Not everyone in the class was as fastidious about cleaning their hands as they could have been.

“If you think about high school males, they’re probably not the best when it comes to food safety practices,” he said. “So you can have cross-contamination.”

The case is a reminder, Rounds said, that all meat, no matter where it comes from, should be treated with careful precautions.

Related stories:

Six new strains of E. coli banned from nation's beef supply

A second chance for faulty food? FDA calls it 'reconditioning'

Nineteen people in seven states have been diagnosed with salmonella infections after reportedly eating ground beef from a chain of Maine-based supermarkets, government health officials said.

The illnesses have all been traced to Hannaford, a Scarborough grocery chain that recalled an undetermined amount of ground beef on Dec. 15, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. The beef was marked with a sell-by date of Dec. 17.

The strain of salmonella Typhimurium detected in the outbreak appears to be resistant to common drugs, which can make the foodborne illness more difficult to treat. Of 15 victims who provided information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seven have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.

Illnesses began on or after Oct. 8 and have been reported through mid-December. Illnesses that occurred after that time might not have been reported yet because of the lag between when a person becomes sick and when they reach out to health officials.

Consumers should check their homes for the recalled products, which are listed here.

Salmonella infections can cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps within hours or days. Illness usually lasts four to seven days. 

Related stories:

Second chance for faulty foods? FDA calls it 'reconditioning'

FDA: Moldy applesauce repackaged by school lunch supplier

Featurepics.com

Chocolate ice cream is a frequent catch-all for botched batches of other flavors, which are doled out in small amounts and mixed with the dark, rich treat in order to avoid waste and expense. Reworking food is a common practice, industry experts say.

When a school lunch supplier repackaged moldy applesauce into canned goods and fruit cups, it drew a sharp warning from federal health regulators last month -- and general disgust from almost everyone else.

“I was appalled that there were actually human beings that were OK with this,” said Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists. “This is a case of unsafe food. They are trying to salvage that to make a buck.”

But even as Food and Drug Administration officials prepare to re-inspect Snokist Growers of Yakima, Wash., to ensure that the applesauce maker keeps toxin-tainted fruit off store shelves, federal officials and industry experts acknowledge that Snokist is not alone in “reworking” faulty food.

Turning imperfect, mislabeled or outright contaminated foods into edible -- and profitable -- goods is so common that virtually all producers do it, at least to some extent, sources say.

“Any food can be reconditioned,” said Jay Cole, a former federal inspector who now works as a senior consultant with The FDA Group, a firm that specializes in helping manufacturers comply with industry regulations.

“It’s how people do their business,” added Shelke, founder of Corvus Blue, a Chicago-based packaged goods consulting firm.

It may be something benign, such as misshapen pieces of pasta that are re-ground into semolina, or something unexpected, like a batch of mislabeled blueberry ice cream mixed in with chocolate to avoid waste.

It might be something unappetizing, such as insect parts sifted out of cocoa beans or live bugs irradiated -- and left behind -- in dried fruits like dates and figs.

Or it could be something alarming, such as the salmonella Tennessee bacteria detected last year in huge lots of hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP, a flavor enhancer used in foods from gravy mix and snack foods to dairy products, spices and soups. 

Some 177 products were recalled in 2010, but bulk HVP products from Basic Food Flavors Inc. of Las Vegas, Nev., were allowed to be reconditioned by heat-treating the foods to kill the salmonella, according to the FDA. The reprocessed foods were then distributed and sold.

No question, FDA regulations do permit foods to be reconditioned, said William Correll, the agency’s acting director of compliance.  That leeway can avoid both waste and expense, he explained.

“Some things can be adulterated and fixed, and you’re not throwing out food that would otherwise be OK,” Correll said.

That’s why chocolate ice cream becomes the catch-all when other flavors aren’t quite right, said Shelke. If a producer accidentally botches a batch of blueberry, small amounts of the mistaken treat can be mixed into future bins of chocolate, where the dark color and rich flavor mask any error.  

The key, however, is that the process must render the food safe for consumption. 

That’s why Snokist Growers drew such a strong warning. In the case of the moldy applesauce, there are a couple of problems, Correll said. Mold is tricky because when contamination is extensive, it’s not enough to simply remove the obviously tainted parts and then zap the food with heat.

Snokist officials claim that their heat process kills patulin, the most common toxin produced by mold in apples, and renders the food commercially sterile. But FDA officials counter that the firm’s thermal process is not adequate to ensure that other heat-stable mycotoxins are eradicated from the food.

“Mold is not an easily reconditionable product,” Correll said. “It’s not OK to take moldy tomatoes and make them into tomato paste.”

Not that some food firms don’t try. It’s no secret that the FDA allows certain levels of expected contaminants to remain in foods, simply because a zero-tolerance standard would be impossible to meet, officials said.

The agency’s “defect action levels” are used to define the point at which food becomes adulterated and subject to enforcement. Below that level, however, some unappetizing substances make it through.

The FDA allows, for instance, an average of 225 insect fragments or 4.5 rodent hairs per 8 ounces of macaroni or noodle products. An average of 20 or more maggots of any size is permitted per 3.5 ounces of drained canned mushrooms, or per half-ounce of dried mushrooms. When it comes to mold, an average count of 15 percent is OK for canned cranberry sauce.

Because such levels are permitted, some food producers propose to combine faulty and sound products to lower the overall level. An apple-juice maker might ask to mix juice with high counts of mold with a batch with low counts, for instance. But, Correll said, that’s not allowed.

“Dilution is not the solution,” he said.

Similarly, companies that propose to eliminate a serious contaminant without addressing the source are turned down. He recalled a seafood firm with faulty bathroom practices that led to canned crab contaminated with fecal E. coli bacteria. Heat-treating would have eradicated the bugs -- but not the problem, Correll said.

“If food is adulterated in an unacceptable way, reconditioning won’t fix it,” he said. “You can’t cook the poop out of it.”

FDA officials couldn’t provide an estimate of the number of reconditioning requests received from food firms each year. But in 2009, the agency started a new Reportable Food Registry, which requires notification of hazards to human health. At least 2,240 reports were logged in the registry’s first year, including the salmonella-tainted vegetable protein.

Many producers faced with faulty food simply want to minimize their losses without harming public health, said Peter Quinter and Jennifer Diaz, lawyers with the Florida firm Becker & Poliakoff, which represents importers of foreign food.

Such firms want to avoid having product refused, so they go to great expense to salvage products such as insect-infested rice for future consumption, Diaz said. Grain products can be sifted, re-inspected, repackaged – and sent on to grocery stores.

“Taking the ick factor away is that the product is no longer contaminated,” she added.

Related stories:

FDA: Moldy applesauce repackaged by school lunch supplier
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Six new E. coli strains banned from beef supply