By Charlie Dunmore and Adrian Croft
Reuters
The European Commission has proposed increased DNA testing of meat products to assess the scale of a scandal involving horsemeat sold as beef that has shocked the public and raised concern over the continent's food supply chains.

"The tests will be on DNA in meat products in all member states," European Union Health Commissioner Tonio Borg told reporters after a ministerial meeting in Brussels to discuss the affair.

The initial one-month testing plan would include premises handling horsemeat to check whether potentially harmful equine medicine residues have entered the food chain, Borg said, with the first results expected by mid-April.

The scandal erupted when tests carried out in Ireland revealed that meat in products labeled as beef was in fact up to 100 percent horsemeat. Operators in at least eight EU countries have since been dragged into the affair, raising fears of a pan-European labeling fraud.

Officials have said no risk to public health from the adulterated foods has been identified at this stage but testing for horse medicine in meat is being undertaken to be sure.

The suspected fraud has caused particular outrage in Britain, where many view the idea of eating horsemeat with distaste, and exposed flaws in food controls.

"This is impacting on the integrity of the food chain, which is a really significant issue for a lot of countries. Now that we know this is a European problem, we need a European solution," Irish farm minister Simon Coveney told reporters before the meeting.

At the urging of ministers, Borg said the Commission would accelerate work on potential changes to EU labeling rules that would force companies to state the country of origin on processed meat products.

Currently the requirement only applies to fresh beef, and is expected to be extended to fresh lamb, pork and poultry from December 2014.

But EU officials have warned privately that the complexity of supply chains would make the requirement almost impossible to implement in practice.

EU and national authorities are still trying to uncover the source of the suspected horsemeat fraud.

"All those countries through which this meat product has passed of course are under suspicion," Borg told a news briefing earlier on Wednesday. "By the countries, I mean the companies in those countries which dealt with this meat product."

He added that it would be unfair at this stage to point the finger at any organization in particular.

Not just horse?
On January 15, routine tests by Ireland's Food Safety Authority found horsemeat in frozen beef burgers produced by firms in Ireland and Britain and sold in supermarket chains including Tesco, Britain's biggest retailer.

Concerns grew last week when the British unit of frozen foods group Findus began recalling packets of beef lasagna on advice from its French supplier Comigel, after tests showed up to 100 percent of the meat in them was horse.

The affair has since implicated operators and middlemen in a range of EU countries, from abattoirs in Romania and factories in Luxembourg to traders in Cyprus and food companies in France.

German supermarket chain Real, part of the world's fourth largest retailer Metro, said tests revealed traces of horsemeat in frozen lasagna on Wednesday. Real, which operates more than 300 stores across Europe's largest economy, said it had already removed the ready-meal from its shelves on Friday.

The first evidence that the labeling scandal could go beyond horsemeat also emerged when the upmarket British grocer Waitrose said its testing found that some of its frozen British beef meatballs might contain pork.
The firm, part of the John Lewis Partnership, has withdrawn the product from sale.

Horsemeat is traditionally prized by many consumers in EU countries such as France, Italy and Belgium.

(Additional reporting by Barbara Lewis in Brussels, Maria Golovnina and Victoria Bryan in London, Alexandra Hudson in Berlin; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed the most sweeping food safety rules in decades, requiring farmers and food companies to be more vigilant in the wake of deadly outbreaks in peanuts, cantaloupe and leafy greens.

The long-overdue regulations are aimed at reducing the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

"We're taking a big step for food safety by proposing the standards that will help us prevent food safety problems rather than just reacting to them," said Michael Taylor, FDA deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.

The FDA's proposed rules would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in some of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at the Colorado farm where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout a New Mexico peanut processing plant and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems and how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said FDA's Taylor.

The new rules come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are often eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

None of the proposed regulations would take effect until after a 120-day comment period. The FDA also is giving the farmers ample time beyond that to comply. Larger farms wouldn't be regulated for more than two years; smaller farms would have even more time.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"These proposed regulations are a sign of progress," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who has been a critic of the FDA. "The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place."

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report

Related:

• Salmonella outbreak in mangoes grows 
• Salmonella in cantaloupes sickens 141
• Who is behind that outbreak? Sometimes the CDC won't say

By Jeri Clausing

The Department of Justice is seeking a permanent injunction against the nation's largest organic peanut butter plant, an eastern New Mexico facility that has been linked to a salmonella outbreak that has sickened 42 people in 20 states this fall. 

The request filed Thursday in federal court in Albuquerque seeks to prohibit Sunland Inc. in Portales from receiving, processing, manufacturing or selling any nut products until the Food and Drug Administration is satisfied its operations are safe.

It wasn't immediately clear what prompted federal prosecutors to get involved in the case against Sunland, whose registration to operate was revoked by the FDA last month because of repeated safety violations.

That order came as the company had planned to reopen some its operations after voluntarily recalling hundreds of products and closing its processing and peanut butter plants in late September and early October.

Last week, a Sunland spokeswoman said the company was hoping to get permission from the FDA to reopen its peanut processing plant so it could begin work on the millions of pounds of Valencia peanuts piled up in barns after a bumper harvest this fall.

Plant officials didn't immediately return phone calls Friday seeking comment.

The FDA's revocation of the company's operation certification marked the first time the FDA used the authority granted under a 2011 food safety law that allows the agency to halt food operations without a court hearing.

The action was denounced as unfair and unnecessarily heavy-handed by many in the conservative farm town of Portales, where Sunland is the largest private employer. At the end of November, the plant had laid off about 30 percent of its 150 workers.

The FDA said inspectors found samples of salmonella in 28 different locations in the plant, in 13 nut butter samples and in one sample of raw peanuts. Inspectors found improper handling of the products, unclean equipment and uncovered trailers of peanuts outside the facility that were exposed to rain and birds. Inspectors also said employees lacked access to hand-washing sinks, and dirty hands had direct contact with ready-to-package peanuts.

The FDA said it inspected the plant at least four times over the past five years, each time finding violations. Michael Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for foods, said the agency's inspections after the outbreak found even worse problems than what had been seen there before.

Plant officials have said they were never notified of past violations.

The salmonella outbreak was traced to Trader Joe's Valencia peanut butter produced at the plant. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 people were sickened, mostly children. Sunland is the nation's largest organic peanut butter plant. It produces organic, natural and traditional products for a number of national grocery and retail chains using mostly Valencia peanuts.

Valencias are a variety of peanuts that come almost exclusively from eastern New Mexico. Because of their sweet flavor, they are favored for organic and natural peanut butter products because they require few additives.

Jonathan Sanger / NBC News

Manuel Carpina cleans food debris left after the garbage was collected at his restaurant, Scarpina Bar & Grill in New York, N.Y. on Nov. 1, 2012. Flooding and lack of electricity caused by Hurricane Sandy left parts of New York City in a mess.

By Andrew Mach and Maggie Fox, NBC News

NEW YORK -- Fish guts flowing down a Union Square street. Untreated sewage in the Hudson River. Spoiled Haagen-Dazs dumped on a deli floor. Toilets that won't flush.

Superstorm Sandy has left a mess behind in a city never exactly known for its cleanliness.

In Manhattan, as power remained out for many customers below 39th street, Rod Zindani, owner of the Best of New York deli on Water St., stood by large plastic trash bags filled with melted single-serve tubs of Haagen-Dazs ice cream. “That’s $1,000 to $1,500 worth,” he told CNBC.

It's all got to go.

"Everybody's throwing out food. All the cooked short ribs, cooked pork, salsas had to go,” said Alfredo Vicuna, the head of kitchen at Tortaria, near Union Square in lower Manhattan. “It will stay good for about 24 hours, but after it got above 40 degrees, we can't use it. I don't even want to think about how much we had to throw out. It's not nice to see. The boss is literally crying right now about how much we lost."

Nearby, Carlos Solorzano watched a restaurant worker in a white chef’s coat hose away fish guts left behind in the street by sanitation workers. Along the curb, a tiny river of pink liquid, sprinkled with fish bones, blue and red octopus parts and bits of mackerel, flowed away.

"When we came back after the storm, some of the food was already rotten, all of the ice cream was melted, all of the fish had already spoiled. We had to throw out about 200 pounds of meat. That's a lot of business, that's their whole menu," said Solorzano, superintendent of the building housing the restaurant.

Jonathan Sanger / NBC News

A large pile of garbage sits outside Petropolis in the Financial District of New York, N.Y. on  Nov. 1, 2012. Flooding and lack of electricity caused by Hurricane Sandy left parts of New York City in a mess.

Refrigerators will keep food cold enough only for about four hours with the door closed. While bottled drinks and nonperishable foods such as peanut butter won’t go bad, any meat, cheese, eggs or cooked food has to go. Freezers only stay cold enough for about 48 hours.

At least one group of New Yorkers might be happy to see all that food tossed into the street: the rats. However, despite fears that rats would invade the city to feast on the garbage or that thousands would be flushed from the depths by floodwaters, a spokeswoman for the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said there's no evidence of an increase in rat activity.

As wary New Yorkers eye the soggy mess left behind by Sandy, some have expressed concern about an outbreak of disease. But experts say fears of cholera or dysentery from the floodwaters likely are overblown.

“The truth is, it’s fairly rare” in developed countries such as the United States, said Dr. Martin Makary, a gastrointestinal specialist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. That’s because people aren’t putting infected sewage into the system in the first place. Even after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf states in 2005, water-borne disease was not a widespread problem, Makary said.

Also, people who collected water in bathtubs, bottles and other containers ahead of the storm should be able to drink it safely even after a few days without refrigeration, Makary said.

Andrew Mach / NBC News

In Battery Park City, a long, blue pipe snakes out of a flooded store near the 9/11 memorial. The brown water flows ankle-deep into the street past a large, yellow dumpster and under parked cars as it collects near another mound of black track bags, broken chairs and other furniture.

“The GI system is extremely resilient to contaminated water,” he said. “Sometimes people insist on sterile water, bottled water. But the most important thing is to avoid cross contamination with sewage. Water that simply been in the tub or out on the counter for a couple of days is likely safe.”

Brett Sherman, 59, and her husband had filled the bathtub and stocked up on bottled water as emergency experts advise. But they finally fled their West Village apartment when their high-rise ran out of water.

"We live in a building about 18 stories high with a water tank on top," Sherman said by telephone from Montclair, N.J., where her stepdaughter lives and has power. "Somebody said  that the water in the tank would last a couple of days but it didn't even last 24 hours. I was surprised by that."

That meant toilets stopped working. Lucky for that bathtub full of water. "A lot of the toilets in buildings like that don't have tanks," Sherman said. "You can just take a bucket of water and pour it in and it flushes. We discovered that," she added. "But can you imagine that going on in hundreds of buildings?"

Seth Wenig / AP

Shopping carts full of food damaged by superstorm Sandy await disposal at the Fairway supermarket in the Red Hook section of the Brooklyn borough of New York, Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012. The food was contaminated by flood waters that rose to approximately four feet in the store during the storm.

The city health department has advice for what people can do when the water comes back on after having been off -- just run the water for 30 seconds until it is cold and clear. " Replace all ice machine filters and beverage dispenser filters, and flush all water lines for five minutes," the web site advises.

Many of the restaurants and shops in Tribeca were still closed and boarded up, save for the few that had generators. But the streets were largely clear and devoid of any excessive amounts of garbage on Thursday. The scene was a far cry from only two days ago, when locals said many of the streets were completely flooded.

According to the website of the New York City Department of Sanitation -- which says it collects 12,000 tons of refuse and recycling on a normal day -- the city was making its regularly scheduled garbage collections “as storm conditions permit.” Recycling pickup was suspended; on its Twitter feed Thursday, @NYCSanitation was advising customers to “try to store [recyclables] as long as you can, please.” The sanitation department was also handling hurricane debris cleanup citywide. “Hang in and we will all get through this. We’re New Yorkers!” it tweeted.

The waters that surround Manhattan -- The Hudson River, East River, New York Harbor -- remain filthy because wastewater treatment plants dumped untreated sewage into them. People shouldn't even touch the water, authorities said.

“Activities such as swimming, canoeing, kayaking, windsurfing or any other water activity that would entail possible direct contact with the water should be avoided until further notice,” the Department of Environmental Protection cautions.

Bacteria in the water can cause an itchy rash and could cause infections if it gets into cuts.

Many residents in high-rises without electricity and people living in flooded areas still lack fresh water supplies. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s Department of Environmental Protection say water coming out of the taps is safe.  And the department has set up portable drinking water stations to areas where water service is down, such as Breezy Point and Rockaway, which were especially hard hit by the storm and by fire.

With contributions from Elizabeth Chuck.

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Courtesy the Lovett family

Diana and Matt Lovett of Larchmont, N.Y., rely on organic baby food for their son, Noam, 4 1/2 months, primarily because it contains no pesticides.

If you’re buying organic foods for your kids because you think they’re more nutritious, you might want to think again. The nation’s pediatricians have weighed in on the issue for the first time, and they say that when it comes to nutritional value, organics are virtually indistinguishable from conventionally produced foods.

“Pretty much every study shows no nutritional difference,” said Dr. Janet Silverstein, a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Florida. She’s a co-author of the report published Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

Silverstein and her colleagues reviewed the available studies on organic and conventionally produced foods, including produce, dairy products and meat. They considered research about issues including nutrition, hormones, antibiotics and synthetic chemical exposure, plus factors such as environmental impact and price.

Overall, the docs came to a conclusion that may surprise some parents who believe organic is best for their kids

“In the long term, there is currently no direct evidence that consuming an organic diet leads to improved health or lower risk of disease,” AAP officials said in a statement.

No large studies been conducted that address the differences, they said. That largely echoes the findings of a Stanford University review last monththat analyzed 237 studies and concluded that organic foods were no more nutritious than conventional -- and ignited huge debates online and on talk shows.

When it comes to the pesky issue of pesticides, hormones and other contaminants, the pediatricians came to a similar conclusion.

No one knows yet whether those substances make foods from conventional sources less safe for growing kids, Silverstein said.

While there’s no question that conventionally grown foods have more pesticides than organic foods, the effect isn’t certain.

“They are at low levels -- certainly lower than the federal government regulatory cutoffs and lower than is thought to be dangerous for adults,” Silverstein said. “However, we don’t know the effect of these low levels on children during the vulnerable period of time when brain growth is occurring: in utero and through the first few years of life.”

Studies evaluating the long-term effects of pesticides on child development need to be conducted, she said.

“Until we know the answer to that question, we can’t really give people good advice other than to let them know what is known and what still needs to be studied,” she added.

One clear difference between organics and conventionally produced food is price. Organics are typically more expensive, in some cases priced 50 percent higher than the same conventionally grown foods.

Parents should recognize the importance of providing kids with lots of fruits and vegetables whether it comes from organic or conventional farms.

“If a parent has limited resources, the most important thing is to give the child a healthy diet and not to give fewer fruits and vegetables because they’re spending more on organic foods,” Silverstein said.

If cost is a factor, families can be selective in choosing organic foods, Silverstein said. Some conventionally grown fruits and vegetables tend to have lower pesticide residues. The AAP cites organic shopper's guides like those provided by Consumer Reports and the Environmental Working Group as references for consumers.

If moms interviewed by NBC News are typical, the new report isn’t likely to dissuade any parents from buying organic.

For Diana Lovett, 34, of Larchmont, N.Y., the most important issue was avoiding pesticides in the foods she gives her son, Noam, 4 ½ months.

“We started him on organic baby food and we’re really happy with it. I just wanted something healthy for my son and didn’t like the idea of pesticides in baby food,” she said.

Lovett says she’d make her own baby food if she couldn’t find an organic product at the supermarket.  “If I could I would grow my own fruits and veggies,” Lovett said. “Organic just feels one step closer to that.”

Gigi Lee Chang, 45, of New York, has been feeding her son, Cato, mostly organic foods since he was a baby. Now that he’s 8, she’s planning on packing organic fruits and vegetables to supplement school lunches.

“I don’t think from a mom’s perspective it was ever about the nutrition,” said Chang, chief executive of Healthy Child, Healthy World, an advocacy group that works to help parents protect children from harmful chemicals.

As far as Chang is concerned, the science just hasn’t had a chance to catch up on this issue. Chang points to the situation with bisphenol A, the estrogen-mimicking chemical known as BPA. Several years ago there wasn’t enough evidence on the impact of BPA, she said. And now it’s been banned from baby bottles and sippy cups.

That makes sense to Rachel Blumenthal, 32, of New York. She chooses organic foods for 18-month-old Griffin’s meals because she’s worried about chemicals in conventional foods.

“It’s really more for long-term health concerns,” she said. “I just don’t want to take the chance. Years and years of cumulative exposure to pesticides can’t be good for anybody. My husband and I try to eat organic, too.”

Blumenthal figures it’s just a matter of time before scientists prove what she suspects.

“Just 20 or 30 years ago everyone was sunbathing,” she said. “Now we know it causes cancer. I anticipate that happening with all these pesticides.”            

Related stories: 

• Organic food no more nutritious than conventional, study finds 
• Trader Joe's peanut butter recalled for salmonella risk
• BPA may boost obesity in kids, study finds