SOME REMAIN WARY IN WAKE OF MASSIVE MEAT RECALL QUESTIONS: RISK TO EATERS WAS LOW, OFFICIALS SAY, BUT NOT ALL ARE CONVINCED.

Byline: Neil Nisperos

Staff Writer

The largest meat recall in U.S. history, stemming from a video of what appears to be animal abuse at a Chino beef slaughterhouse, was enough to turn one Chino Hills family into vegetarians for the foreseeable future.

Denise Clendening, environmental director for a consulting firm that assesses potential school sites, said she is concerned about the health of her two daughters, 12 and 17 years old.

"There are a lot of unanswered questions about food safety right now," she said.

Though experts say it's highly unlikely, Clendening fears her daughteres could have contracted mad cow disease from eating the recalled meat at school. Since the recall, she has stopped purchasing meat for family meals and has advised her children not to eat meat at school.

Federal rules prohibit meat from downer cattle -- ones too sick or injured to walk -- from entering the food supply because of a higher risk of mad cow disease in nonambulatory cattle.

The Westland/Hallmark Meat Company voluntarily recalled 143million pounds of its beef last month after video evidence from the Humane Society showed workers forcing downer cattle into a slaughter line at the company's Chino plant.

"For the long term, I'm concerned about mad cow disease, and for the short term, we don't know," Clendening said. "What I thought was the stomach flu -- maybe it was E. coli or salmonella from this recalled meat."

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a fatal condition in which an abnormal growth of a protein in a cow's nervous system causes spongelike holes to form in its brain, said Shelton Murinda, associate professor and director of the Center for Antimicrobial Research and Food Safety at Cal Poly Pomona.

In the past 30 years, 180,000 livestock in the United Kingdom were infected with the disease, and dozens of Europeans are believed to have contracted the human form of the condition after eating the infected meat.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture officials and Murinda said the chance of Americans getting sick from the recalled meat is extremely remote.

"Of all the cows that have been tested for mad cow disease in the United States, as far as I know, there was only one cow imported from Canada and one cow in the United States (that had the disease)," Murinda said.

"There have been surveys to test for mad cow disease in this country, and out of those surveys, I think it was almost a quarter of a million cattle that were tested by the USDA. None of them tested positive. The prevalence of mad cow disease in the United States is very, very low."

Murinda also said E. coli and salmonella should not be a concern in connection with the recall, because no one has come forward with illnesses found to be related to eating meat from the plant. The USDA classified the recall as level 2 -- a recall of beef that poses a low health risk to the consumer.

"There is no correlation here at all," Murinda said of the recall and those foodborne illnesses. "Nobody got sick and nobody has identified a pathogen in these products. There is no one who has gone to the hospital who has said 'I'm sick' and then they traced back those products to Westland/Hallmark."

Still, Clendening said she won't be totally convinced meat is safe until the USDA tests the recalled beef.

"(The USDA) has indicated they are not testing any of the recalled meat," Clendening said. "If they tested the meat, we wouldn't be so concerned."

The Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., which has been closed since the recall, was the second-largest supplier of beef to the National School Lunch Program. Schools throughout the nation have since discarded the recalled meat.

The USDA also has announced interim precautionary actions relating to meat inspections pending results of an investigation into whether the slaughterhouse company or the federal agency was at fault.

The USDA said it would increase surveillance of slaughterhouse activities in the wake of the recall, increase inspection time per shift and issue notices to inspectors to reinforce humane work methods at slaughter sites.

neil.nisperos(at)dailybulletin.com