Can the state mend broken food safety system?

PART TWO: Support of lawmakers, money and public access needed

By Tim Darragh | Of The Morning Call

August 1, 2005

Second of a two-day series

Pennsylvania must boost spending by tens of millions of dollars, give easier public access to information and consolidate oversight for public health services if it ever hopes to fix its broken system for inspecting restaurants and food retailers.

The state's leadership has known for years that Pennsylvania's food inspection system needs fixing. But little change has come.

''We haven't had a reason to take a look at it,'' said state Sen. Jake Corman, chairman of the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee, which has legislative authority over Pennsylvania's public health systems.

However, statistics and a Morning Call analysis suggest there's much that needs examination. Two-thirds of reported food-borne illnesses in a 14-year period in Pennsylvania were linked to the state's eateries. And the newspaper's analysis of 78,000 food inspection records reveals severe problems with the system: years between inspections at many establishments, undertrained and ill-equipped inspectors, and spotty or nonexistent recordkeeping. The newspaper undertook months of legal action to obtain the information for its analysis.

In 2002, state officials received a road map to improvement at a roundtable of health officials and food industry representatives, which recommended remedies for many of the problems identified by The Morning Call's analysis. The panel's recommendations were largely ignored.

Even without the panel's recommendations, all Pennsylvania had to do was look at what other states have done.

Consider Louisiana, for instance.

Louisiana uses general tax revenues to pay for its approximately $11.5 million inspection program. Pennsylvania also uses tax revenue to pay for its $9.1 million Department of Agriculture system, but that's where the similarity ends.

Louisiana provides a one-stop inspection shop, the Department of Health and Hospitals, for food establishment inspections in that state. In Pennsylvania, the responsibility for inspections is scattered among the Agriculture Department, 10 full-service systems operated by cities or counties, and 230 local bare-bones operations in smaller communities.

Louisiana employs almost four times as many inspectors as Pennsylvania and gives them only 74 percent of the Pennsylvania inspectors' workload. That gives Louisiana a chance to inspect its food retailers and world-renowned restaurants an average 2.5 times a year, compared with Pennsylvania, where restaurants average one inspection every two years.

Louisiana also has one other thing that Pennsylvania lacks: easy public access to restaurant and food retailer inspection reports. In April, at a cost of less than $500,000, the state began putting the reports online for every one of the 35,269 licensed eateries in Louisiana.

In Pennsylvania, it took The Morning Call months and dozens of requests to state and regional offices under the Right-to-Know Law to obtain inspection reports. Even then, two municipalities refused and one — Easton — relented only after two months of legal wrangling. Few agencies keep computerized records, and some don't keep any records at all.

Louisiana officials wondering if the public would be interested in online restaurant inspection reports didn't have long to wait. The state's Web site received so many hits that its computer server crashed two days after it went live.

On Sunday, The Morning Call's online database of about 200,000 food inspection records, including more than 78,000 from the Lehigh Valley area, debuted on mcall.com. It is the only online source for this information in Pennsylvania.

Falling on deaf ears

Like Louisiana, Pennsylvania once was poised to improve its food establishment inspection, in 2001 and 2002, when experts hoped the incoming Rendell administration would show interest in boosting public health. But progress toward system reform faded as the administration's other budget priorities crowded out public health needs.

In 2001, a panel of health officials and food industry representatives called the Pennsylvania Food Safety Alliance issued recommendations to industry and state and federal officials urging improved public health services, including food establishment inspections. The group pushed for consistent regulation of food establishments, standardized training, a central inspection system, food safety education, an assessment of the risks of inspector vacancies and unqualified health officers, and better surveillance of food-borne illness outbreaks.

State officials have yet to act on many of the recommendations, leaving Pennsylvania with no standardization in training or qualifications for inspectors, recordkeeping or the frequency of inspections.

The state has taken two steps in response to the alliance's report: the creation of an Internet-based disease reporting system and the adoption of the FDA's Food Code in 2003. The reporting system provides faster tracking of food-borne illness outbreaks for epidemiologists, but not the public. For consumers, the newer Food Code has led to one noticeable change: Restaurants now are required to post health warnings on menus if they allow customers to order foods that could be hazardous, such as hamburger cooked rare.