Supermarket chains have begun offering irradiated hamburg as a premium product.

WASHINGTON – The forces of reason finally have won a rare victory over those who have been waging a junk science campaign to prevent irradiation aimed at eliminating potentially lethal bacteria in the foods we eat.

U.S. school kids will start getting irradiated hamburgers in their school lunches next year – ground beef lightly zapped with electron beams that kill E. coli and other dangerous bacteria more effectively than any other system ever devised.

That will prevent needless deaths like those of the four American children who died in 1993 after eating restaurant hamburgers with deadly E. coli O157 bacteria.

More than two-dozen U.S. supermarket chains already have begun offering irradiated hamburgers as a premium product.

Giant Food, the largest supermarket chain in the Washington-Baltimore area, touts irradiation as a “revolutionary technology that virtually eliminates all illness-causing bacteria, giving you peace of mind when serving ground beef to your friends and family.”

The Dairy Queen and Embers America restaurant chains are shifting to the irradiated ground beef and, what’s more, bragging about it to customers.

Across the country, several more companies are building plants to irradiate more and more of the country’s ground beef for 10 to 20 cents per pound. That’s a small price to pay for what is arguably the biggest step forward in U.S. food safety since pasteurized milk.

The patent for irradiating dangerous foods was issued way back in 1921. All it took was 60 years and a few hundred agonizing deaths to persuade the powers that be. That’s about par for the course in our contentious and increasingly litigious society. It took 50 years to get approval for pasteurized milk.

The tragic 1993 deaths of those four kids in Washington state finally brought home the reality that a more-virulent and deadly form of the ubiquitous E. coli bacterium was actually threatening us and our kids with death, not just stomach aches.

The Jack-in-the-Box cases were first blamed on carelessness by the restaurant. Only reluctantly did we delve into the danger, discovering that virulent O157 strain was present in virtually every cattle herd in America, and a risk in any hamburger not cooked into shoe leather.

The organic food industry was quick to assert that the deadly bacteria was present only on factory farms, but USDA researchers say they’ve found it in every cattle herd where they’ve looked for it.

Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen Group still hasn’t given up its anti-irradiation campaign. Public Citizen has flooded the U.S. Department of Agriculture with hundreds of identical complaints against the plan to deliver irradiated hamburgers to school kids. The Nader group complains that “the risks of irradiation are unknown.” This after 40 years of extensive research failed to find any risks.

Public Citizen also charges that irradiation will simply let meat packing plants be careless about their sanitation. That’s a pretty feeble argument when you realize that (1) people are dying for lack of irradiation; (2) the packing plants are still overseen by federal meat inspectors; and (3) the E. coli can’t be seen with the naked eye or washed off with

anything less than live steam.

As Michael Osterholm, then Minnesota state epidemiologist, told the U.S. Senate nearly five years ago: “The residual risk for infection that remains in ground beef after state-of-the-art sanitation during production, harvest, processing, distribution and preparation still yields an unacceptable level of illness and death. … The lives of our loved ones are at risk.”

Teia Clement, 15, was sickened by the O157 strain of E. coli in June, at her school prom in Missassauga, Ontario, along with more than 40 other students. She described it as “a living hell,” and said she had “never experienced anything remotely as painful” as the attendant severe stomach cramps, bloody diarrhea, vomiting and headaches.

Hospitals have used irradiation for years to sterilize food for immune-compromised patients, and NASA has used it for the astronauts’ food on space flights. It’s been approved and applauded by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the Institute of Food Technology and the governments of 37 countries around the world. But the public wouldn’t buy it in the face of the scary rumors that it was dangerous.

Public Citizen apparently would protect our kids from E. coli O157 by attacking our best weapon – irradiation – with lawsuits and press releases.

The Department of Agriculture has a more sensible solution – embracing modern technology by using safe and effective irradiation to conquer deadly food-borne bacteria before it kills more Americans.

Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow at The Hudson Institute, www.hudsoninstitute.org.

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