The Morning Blend
Welcome
Complete Media Kit
SIERRA VISTA — The Sierra Vista school district, which has been affected by the recent beef recall, likely has tainted beef sitting in its freezers, a school food service representative said Wednesday.
The district will be taking inventories of its stock, searching for specific case numbers that need to be pulled.
The school district contracts with Sodexho School Services, a company that provides food for schools throughout the United States, as well as a number of foreign countries. Sodexho gets some of its beef from Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., the slaughterhouse that was the target of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent beef recall.
As soon as the school district was notified by the Arizona Department of Education Food Distribution Unit that some items in its inventory may have come from Westland’s recalled products, all beef items were immediately put on hold, said Jose Cota, general manager of Sodexho for the Sierra Vista school district. Menu items containing beef were substituted with something else, with the exception of beef purchased from other distributors.
|
|
“The investigation has been finalized, and now we know what case numbers have to be pulled,” Cota said. “If we have more than 50 cases that need to be pulled, we’ll have to contact the health department to help with the discarding process.”
All items in question will be destroyed per state Department of Education standards, Cota said.
The California slaughterhouse was shut down in a probe of the largest U.S. beef recall ever when workers were videotaped slaughtering sick and injured cattle that were unable to stand, referred to as “downer cows.” The federal government has banned downer cows from the food supply, as they pose a greater contamination risk for mad-cow disease.
The government is concerned about mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) because it is similar to a very rare and incurable degenerative brain disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans, although it has not been proven that the disorder passes to humans from infected beef, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other authorities.
To date, there have been no reports of health problems from the suspect meat and health threats appear to be minimal.
It’s unclear how much of the recalled beef has already been eaten, as about 37 million pounds had been sent to school lunch programs around the country, as well as to some fast food chains.
The recall was initiated when the Humane Society released an undercover videotape that showed workers treating cattle inhumanely and slaughtering downer cows.
A recall of 143 million pounds of the company’s beef products was announced Feb. 17 after the U.S. Department of Agriculture suspended Westland’s participation in federal food and nutrition programs amid an investigation of alleged cattle abuse.
According to the USDA, there is only a remote possibility of people getting sick from eating the tainted beef, which was distributed between February 2006 and this month.
Herald/Review reporter Dana Cole can be reached at 515-4618 or by e-mail at dana.cole@svherald.com.
Really? wrote on Feb 28, 2008 7:48 AM: