Contaminated Frozen Strawberries - April 1997 | TheDailyBeast.com: America's Worst Food Scares

TheDailyBeast.com: America's Worst Food Scares

Contaminated Frozen Strawberries - April 1997

Michigan parents panicked in April 1997 when frozen strawberries contaminated with hepatitis A were served in school desserts, leading to 153 cases of hepatitis in children and schoolteachers. The strawberries, harvested and processed at plants like this one in Irapuato, Mexico, were also sold to schools in California, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee and Iowa.

(Photo: Joe Cavaretta / AP)

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America's Worst ...

Salmonella. E. coli. Eggs. Beef, spinach, peanut butter. Every few months there's a new food-borne threat to worry about, or a grocery favorite to avoid. Recently, mad cow disease was found at a California farm. In a country as technologically advanced and heavily regulated as the United States, food shouldn't be so complicated. But even as consumers have become better-versed in home food-safety techniques, mass production has made it easier for food-borne illnesses (and the mass hysteria that follows) to spread across the country. So, more than a century after the idea of "food poisoning" first entered the public consciousness, we're still fighting some of the same, mysterious battles to make sure that what we eat is safe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that food safety problems now account for roughly 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually. With help from Morton Satin, director of the Salt Institute and author of two books on food poisoning and safety, here's a look at how food safety has changed—and how it hasn't.

(Photo: Charlie Riedel/AP)

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

The Deadliest Pork Dishes in America

9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Recalled Baby-Fo...

The Food and Drug Administration, founded in 1927, is tasked with regulating and inspecting the American food supply. The agency has taken heat in the past, though, for insufficiently testing seafood imports and failing to follow through on product recalls. Congressman Al Gore, pictured here in 1979, held hearings to determine why the FDA didn’t force a baby-food manufacturer to pull all of its recalled cans from shelves. Those hearings led to stricter industry regulation in the Infant Formula Act of 1980.

(Photo: John Duricka / AP)

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

The Deadliest Pork Dishes in America

9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Extra-Strength T...

Seven people in the Chicago area died in 1982 after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with lethal amounts of cyanide. Johnson and Johnson pulled the product from shelves nationwide, Chicago health-department workers (pictured) examined thousands of returned bottles, and a task force of 35 investigators searched for the culprit, but the source of the tampering was never found. An increase in food-tampering crimes that year prompted the food and drug industries to introduce stricter manufacturing standards and new, tamper-proof packaging to keep consumers safe.

(Photo: Charlie Knoblock / AP)

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

The Deadliest Pork Dishes in America

9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Meat and Poultry...

In July 1996, President Bill Clinton ordered sweeping reforms to the meat- and poultry-inspection system. By mandating microbiological tests for E. coli and salmonella and instituting new cleanliness standards, Clinton hoped to update a decades-old system that primarily used physical appearance and smell to root out microscopic contaminants. Here, a freshly killed chicken is cleaned at the Post Avenue Poultry Market in New York.

(Photo: Wally Santana / AP)

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

The Deadliest Pork Dishes in America

9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Contaminated Fro...

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

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9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Mad-Cow Disease ...

Mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is a condition that causes nervous-system degeneration in cows and can lead to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a similar illness, in humans. Caused when cows are fed infected meat or bone proteins from their own species, mad-cow disease first appeared in the United Kingdom in 1986. Since then, nearly 200 people around the world have died from C-J disease, but the U.S. has not seen more than a handful of either the bovine or the human form. Nonetheless, even the remote possibility that the disease may have migrated into the food supply can cause panic. In April 2008, the USDA asked for a recall of school lunchmeats in 26 states. No evidence of contamination was found, but the distributor, Westland/Hallmark Meat, recalled 143 million pounds of ground beef, making the incident the largest beef recall in U.S. history. And just this week, mad cow disease was found at a California farm.

(Photo: E. B. McGovern / AP)

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

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9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Topps Meat E. Co...

After recalling 21.7 million pounds of frozen hamburgers contaminated with E. coli, Topps Meat Company declared bankruptcy and shut its doors in September 2007. The company, which specialized in ground beef, had been in business for 67 years.

(Photo: Mike Derer / AP)

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

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9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Salmonella in Ra...

A mysterious outbreak of salmonella in April 2008 led the FDA to issue a warning against consuming raw tomatoes. After a three-month investigation, the FDA announced that jalapeño peppers were the real threat, but not before more than 1,000 people became ill and the tomato industry suffered $100 million in lost sales. Many small producers (like Gonzales Packing Company, owned by the family of Angie Horwath, pictured here) were devastated during their peak season.

(Photo: iStock)

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

The Deadliest Pork Dishes in America

9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Salmonella in Pe...

In January 2009, Peanut Corp. of America was found to be responsible for an outbreak of salmonella in peanut-butter products, which had begun in late 2008 and by early March 2009 had caused nine deaths and 677 illnesses in 45 states. This wasn’t the first time that unhygienic plant conditions had led to peanut-butter contamination; because many peanut products aren’t cooked after purchase, they can quickly spread bacteria if not processed correctly. In this particular scare, more than 1,800 products were pulled from grocery-store shelves, including popular desserts, snack crackers, pet foods and even military rations.

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

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9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Salmonella in Pi...

In March 2009, the FDA warned consumers not to eat pistachios because of a potential salmonella contamination. After Kraft Foods found traces of salmonella in one of its trail mix blends, the company, along with the Kroger grocery chain and California-based nut supplier Setton Pistachio, voluntarily recalled some of its products. The FDA says it will take weeks to determine how many of these batches are unsafe; some of the nuts may have been improperly roasted or have come into contact with birds or rodents.

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25 Deadliest Red Meat Meals

The Deadliest Pork Dishes in America

9 Unhealthy Paula Deen Recipes

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Salmonella in Eg...

In August 2010, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms in Iowa voluntarily recalled half a billion eggs after a nationwide salmonella outbreak was traced back to the two large egg producers. In June and July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received reports of approximately 200 illnesses every week—four times greater than the historical weekly average. The recall, less than a month after a new egg safety rule aimed at reducing salmonella went into effect, involved more than two dozen different brands. The FDA called it "one of the largest shell egg recalls in recent history."

(Photo: Charlie Neibergall / AP)

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