Listeria Cause & Effect 'Highly likely' Bacteria in Slicers to blame"

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Listeria Cause & Effect 'Highly likely' Bacteria in Slicers to blame"

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Opinion

Barry Artiste

The CEO of Maple Leaf Foods states they are the leaders in sanitation, going above and beyond Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points HACCP, perhaps needs to go further when industry standards obviously are not enough and need to be overhauled.

Considering the expense in dismantling of meat machinery has found bacteria deep inside these units, regardless of the associated downtime affecting the assembly process, keeping the process line moving should be secondary when health and welfare of it's consumers is paramount.

Either find new machinery or modify existing machinery which can be quickly dismantled and cleaned thoroughly, or go back to men and women with simpler butcher knives to do the cutting, It is pretty quick and easy to clean a butchers knife and a table.  Sometimes simpler methods in days of old are safer.  A Man and a Knife.

http://www.ottawasun.com/News/National/2008/09/06/6678731-sun.html

'Highly likely' slicers to blame:Bacteria in equipment may have led to listeria outbreak

By AMY CHUNG AND JASON BUCKLAND, SUN MEDIA

TORONTO -- Maple Leaf Foods said last night it is "highly likely" their meat slicing machines were the source of a listeria outbreak that killed 13 people across the country.

Less than a week after a longtime employee of the North York plant that produced the tainted meat told Sun Media some of the meat processing machines were not cleaned in years, Maple Leaf president and CEO Michael McCain said the bacteria was found "deep inside" the equipment.

The worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said the equipment hadn't received a good scrubbing until the plant shutdown three weeks ago, after the listeria outbreak.

"They haven't cleaned some of the machines' (interiors) in four, five years," the worker said.