Recipe for rotten eggs

KEEP YOUR SUNNY SIDE down - and your eggs fully cooked - if you want to protect your family from getting sick from eggs tainted with salmonella bacteria.

The recent recall of a half-billion eggs from just two Iowa egg producers proves that your government hasn't been able to keep tainted eggs from the nation's supermarket dairy cases.

About 1,300 cases of salmonella have been reported in 10 states. The usually mild symptoms resemble intestinal flu - although, like flu, they can prove serious, even fatal, to people with weakened immune systems. (Fully cooking eggs is the only way to kill the bacteria.)

Like so many recent instances of food-borne illness - from peanut butter and hamburger to pistachios and jalapeno peppers - this was an outbreak waiting to happen. Increased consolidation of egg production paired with decreased regulation (not to mention unscrupulous businesses willing to take advantage of major cracks in the food- safety system) and it was all but inevitable.

When most of our eggs originated from hens that scratched around in barnyards on actual farms, they were among the safest foods available. Now just 192 egg companies own about 95 percent of laying hens, down from 2,500 in 1987, according to the Washington Post. Huge factory-like chicken farms multiply the risks of salmonella contamination from rodent feces that carry it. Eggs from one producer often are sold to dozens of packagers, so problems in one egg company can be shipped to many different states.

It was only on July 9 that egg companies were required to adopt safety procedures that have been shown (in a model developed in Pennsylvania) to greatly reduce the danger of salmonella contamination. These include no-brainers like being required to buy chicks and young hens only from suppliers who monitor for salmonella, establishing rodent- and pest-control procedures or even cleaning and disinfecting poultry houses that have tested positive for the bacteria.

President Clinton ordered the Food and Drug Administration to adopt the regulations in 1999, but then came the Bush administration and a surge of anti-regulation fervor (and fevered lobbying). So nothing happened until last summer, when the Obama administration adopted the rules and gave the industry a year to comply.

That is one reason why - even though the egg producers in this case had a string of serious health and safety violations going back years - the FDA had never inspected the factories. If the new regulations had been in effect, the contamination could "most likely" have been prevented, said FDA chief Margaret Hamburg.

But even now, the FDA doesn't have the power to order a recall of contaminated food. That's still a decision left up to industry. And responsibility for enforcement of food-safety regulations continues to be split among various government agencies. Get this: The Department of Agriculture has jurisdiction over inspections of chickens, but the FDA is in charge of the eggs. (Which begs the question, not only of which comes first, but who's in charge.)

A year ago, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to streamline food-safety enforcement, giving the FDA the power to order recalls. The bill is - you guessed it - stalled in the Senate and opposed by some farmers who claim new regulations will reduce profits. (We wonder: How does increased distrust in the safety of the nation's food help the bottom line?)

Haven't we seen enough of our food choices - and our families' health - being held hostage to chicken-hearted legislators? This legislation should be unstalled, and fast. *