Schools in the dark about tainted lunches

Students at Starbuck Middle School stumbled through the halls just after lunch on Oct. 31, 2007, holding their bellies and moaning. When the vomiting began, teachers knew that it wasn't a Halloween prank.

By midafternoon, almost 70 children waited outside the nurse's office at the school near Milwaukee. "There were so many kids there, it was like, 'Holy cow!' " recalls Michael Hannes, then a seventh-grader who felt "like someone kept punching me in the stomach."

Days would pass before local health officials determined that the tortillas served at Starbuck and four other schools in Racine were to blame for 101 illnesses.

An Internet search showed them the stunning particulars: The company that supplied the tortillas had a long history of making children sick.

Before the illnesses in Racine, flour tortillas from Chicago's Del Rey Tortilleria caused similar outbreaks at more than a dozen schools in two other states — in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. In 2006, Del Rey recalled tens of thousands of tortillas after health officials linked them to illnesses at schools in Massachusetts and Illinois. And in a 2006 study of prior outbreaks, a panel of top scientists with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration even offered this warning: "Flour tortillas manufactured by Del Rey hold the potential to cause illness."

Despite the concerns, the FDA never shared the panel's warning with school officials anywhere.

Despite the concerns, the FDA never shared the panel's warning with school officials anywhere.

USA TODAY analyzed food-borne illness cases logged by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1998 and 2007, the last year for which data were available. The newspaper found more than 470 outbreaks at schools during that period. Those outbreaks sickened at least 23,000 children, and the foods responsible — pasta, chicken tenders, turkey and chocolate milk, among others — are lunchroom staples.

The true toll is likely higher. Based on its own studies, the CDC says millions of food-borne illnesses go unreported each year; no one knows how many involve schoolchildren. After the Racine outbreak, records examined by the school district's health director revealed that 47 kids at five middle schools had gotten sick on a "Taco Day" two weeks before the Halloween illnesses. The cluster would have gone unnoticed if not for the larger outbreak that followed.

Parents who don't pack their child's lunch are left to trust the government — whether at the school or federal level — to do the shopping. In most cases, USA TODAY found, that trust — like the buying itself — is blind:

•Schools have virtually no hope of figuring out where all of the food on a child's lunch tray originates. That's because the food often is handled by many processors and distributors. "There's no way I could possibly keep track," says Katie Wilson, director of the meals program for the Onalaska, Wis., public schools and the former president of the School Nutrition Association, a group of officials who oversee lunch programs.

•If schools determine who made the food they serve, the government provides no timely way for them to check the health and safety records of those companies. Inspection reports on companies that supply food are not posted publicly, and school officials must file formal requests that often take months to fulfill.

•When the government finds problems at companies, it does little to alert parents, schools or food distributors — especially if the company doesn't supply commodities directly to the National School Lunch Program.

The systemic failures are "outrageous … alarming and unacceptable," says Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. "Our schools and parents have a right to know where food is coming from and whether it's high-quality."

School lunches, like the one depicted in the photo, are pretty bad. Yes. But whatever you believe about their nutritional value, they aren't supposed to make you acutely sick!

This also just in:

Agriculture chief promises better food alerts to schools

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack pledged Tuesday that the government will do a better job alerting schools across the nation when it suspects that food for school lunches might be contaminated.

"We understand and appreciate that there has been a … gap in communication, which results in school districts not getting information on a timely basis," Vilsack told lawmakers during a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on child nutrition programs.

Originally posted by rhiannonslair
The lack of healthy food in schools is even being passed off as normal.

Why a recall of tainted beef didn't include school lunches

When health officials identified an outbreak of salmonella poisonings last summer, they traced the dangerous strain of salmonella to ground beef made at Beef Packers Inc., a major supplier to the National School Lunch Program.

At least 39 people reported getting sick in 11 states, and doctors found that the salmonella infections resisted many common antibiotics. By early August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture convened a committee of experts and urged Beef Packers to recall 825,769 pounds of ground beef made in June at its facility in Fresno.

The recall, announced by the governmentAug. 6, covered only ground beef sent to certain retailers. In the days after it was announced, government and company spokesmen said meat sent to schools was not included.