Unsanitary shipping pallets posing threats to food safety? – National Consumers League

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By Courtney Brein, Linda Golodner Food Safety and Nutrition Fellow

As the Linda Golodner Food Safety and Nutrition Fellow at the National Consumers League, I work on a wide range of food safety and nutrition issues. While, on the food safety front, the topics on which I focus run the gamut, ultimately, they all share a common purpose: improving the safety of the food that American consumers purchase, serve, and eat.

Due in part to a string of recent foodborne illness outbreaks, and in part to an administration that has chosen to prioritize improving food safety, the environment is ripe for making significant changes to – and expansions upon – the mechanisms currently in place for protecting our food supply. More than a year ago, President Obama created a White House Food Safety Working Group co-chaired by Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. The group has recommended a public health focused approach to food safety that prioritizes prevention and strengthens surveillance and enforcement, among other measures. On the Congressional front, FDA food safety modernization legislation passed in the House last summer and is slated to come to the Senate floor soon. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently set new performance standards for Salmonella and Campylobacter in young chickens and turkeys, in an effort to help prevent tens of thousands of illnesses every year. To help consumers stay up-to-date on recalls and other food safety issues, HHS and USDA launched www.foodsafety.gov last September. The list goes on.

Central to the creation of an effective food safety system is the assurance that measures are in place to protect products at every step of the way along the path from “farm to fork,” as the saying goes. While regulations and inspections help to ensure the safety of food grown on farms and produced in factories, and consumer education helps to reduce cross-contamination and unsafe cooking practices in the home, the area in between – the transportation of food from production to purchase point – remains largely overlooked and under-regulated.

Several months ago, NCL Executive Director Sally Greenberg and I began to wonder what role, if any, the pallets used to transport food might potentially play in the contamination of the food supply. Our first tip-off was McNeil’s recall of Tylenol and several other products this past December and January. The company linked the moldy, musty odor – and the unpleasant side-effects it caused in many individuals who consumed the products – to the wood pallets that were stored in the area where these products were made. According to McNeil, when a chemical used to treat the pallets started to break down, another chemical called TBA formed in the air and contaminated the products. When we realized that these pallets were, at least generally speaking, the same as the ones stacked behind many grocery stores, we started to wonder why the shipping platforms that transport food were being stored outside, and if there were any regulations governing the use of pallets.

Our research revealed that pallets are, in fact, more or less overlooked in the regulatory sphere. We decided to conduct exploratory testing of the pallets used to transport food, to determine whether the issue warranted a call for FDA’s consideration. We’ve been at this a long time – NCL first drew attention to potentially harmful products in 1904, when NCL volunteers staffing a booth at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair demonstrated to fairgoers that canned green beans touted by food processors as a labor-saving home product were adulterated with green dye. More than 100 years later, we continue this work; this past December, the League called on the FDA to investigate a “sweetened dried cranberry” product that our commissioned lab tests found to be mostly sugar, and made of cranberry skins rather than whole cranberries as advertised.

For this investigation, we tested pallets in the Miami/Tampa area and in Houston. We located a highly regarded lab that gave us strict instructions on taking samples and shipping them back, which we followed to the letter. Many of the pallets I saw – and tested – were really dirty, sullied with items ranging from bird droppings to fish scales. They were stored outside, exposed to the elements, and easily accessible to rodents, insects, and birds. I became intimately familiar with these shipping platforms – both wood and plastic – and the precise, methodical way in which one takes samples to send to a lab. In all, we took samples from 35 plastic pallets and 35 wood pallets in each metropolitan area, totaling 140 samples. We had no idea what our results would be.

As it turned out, our findings were significant – and alarming. The lab found E. coli on 10 percent of the 70 wood pallets we tested, and on 1.4 percent of the 70 plastic pallets. The lab report also revealed the presence of Listeria on 2.9 percent of the wood pallets, half of which further tested positive for Listeria monocytogenes. None of the plastic pallets tested positive for Listeria. High aerobic plate counts, which reflect unsanitary conditions of the pallets, were found on both types of pallets, with approximately one third of the wood pallets and one fifth of the plastic pallets showing the high counts.

While our exploratory testing included only a small number of pallets, we think it gives some indication that the sanitation and safety of the pallets used to transport food in the U.S. deserve a closer examination. This past Tuesday, therefore, the League sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, sharing our findings, urging the agency to do its own testing, and calling on FDA to set standards that will help to ensure that pallets are cleaned and stored properly, thus minimizing the possibility that they will be implicated in the spread of foodborne illness. Additionally, we videotaped our testing – check it out.

Safety precautions at Deepwater Horizon could have spared lives, environment – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

This has been a terrible season for American workers engaged in dangers jobs. Last month, 29 coalminers died when the Massey mine in West Virginia collapsed; and 11 oil rig workers died April 20 after the massive explosion in BP’s Deepwater Horizon operation. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 18 (“Deepwater Oil Rigs Lack Preparations for Disasters”) that many of the companies engaged in offshore drilling operations – a very lucrative business but one that is fraught with potentially catastrophic consequences when things go wrong – did not put in place, and weren’t required to put in place, safety measures when things do go wrong.

Not only are workers dead, but the Deepwater Horizon disaster has thousands of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico every day. It’s hard to know where to start when tallying up the disastrous consequences of this environmental and workplace catastrophe caused by lax regulation and careless management at BP.

One place is increasing the deterrents against such indefensible corporate behavior by removing the $75 million cap on liability for companies involved in oil spills. There should be no cap at all. NCL signed a letter with other consumer groups asking to remove it. The Obama Administration has also pledged to tighten up what appears to have been a dangerously cozy relationship between regulators and the oil industry. This includes the Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service, resulting in permits being given to companies to drill without those companies having to go through the usual process of documenting how they intended to ensure both worker and environmental safety.

Numerous congressional hearings are scheduled on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the coming weeks. And Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and will preside at several of the hearings, has said there will be no more permits issued for offshore drilling until the proper safety measures are in place. It’s sad that it takes a tragedy like this – and 11 innocent workers’ lives – to get regulators and companies to do what they should have done all along: put in place basic safety precaution that would have prevented this catastrophe.

Financial reform bill a major turning point for consumers – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

This week marked a historic turning point in the fight for financial reform. A bill passed by the Senate will help protect consumers from usury by banks, payday lenders, and car dealer financing schemes that rip off hardworking Americans. The Senate now joins the House in having passed this landmark legislation – now the bills will need to be reconciled in conference and sent to the President. A big shout-out goes to Americans for Financial Reform – a vibrant coalition of consumer, labor, and civil rights groups – for helping get the Senate bill over the finish line

What’s in the bill for consumers? Well, everything really; this is a bill that came out of the consumer movement. The idea of a regulatory body to protect consumers from harmful financial products emanated from Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, who made an interesting point – when you buy a toaster you’re not expected to look at the wiring diagram in the product manual to see if it’s safe. The same should be true of a financial product. It should be safe and transparent for consumer. But today it is not, whether it’s a credit card, a mortgage, or a payday loan, consumers rarely know or understand what lurks inside the 30-page agreement they are signing.

The Senate bill creates a new federal regulatory agency, housed within the Federal Reserve but independent, to write and enforce rules protecting consumers of financial products like checking accounts, mortgages, and payday loans and auto loans. The Senate version also allows state regulators – notably the Attorneys General in the states – to enforce these protections – instead of preempting them from doing so, as Congress has been inclined to do to many times in the past (thereby destroying yet another line of defense for consumers).

The Senate bill includes auto dealers, but the House bill unfortunately exempts them from oversight and coverage under the bill. This is a serious mistake; dealer-financed auto loans are notorious for ripping off middle and lower income consumers, including young enlisted men and women and their families. Too many dealers have been willing to play games with buyers, insisting they can’t find them a lower interest loan, telling them their financing fell through at a lower rate but they can find them a loan a few percentage points higher – then the dealer pockets the difference when the unwitting consumer pays more. This is an industry that cries out for regulatory oversight. NCL hopes in the days to come that the Senate won’t be forced to capitulate to the auto dealers’ lobbing juggernaut.

There are many other important provisions in the bill, including regulation of derivatives, curbs on financial institution borrowing and spending to avoid the “too big to fail” scenarios we’ve seen all too much, and investor protections. Hats off to Americans for Financial Reform and the Senators who supported these landmark reforms. NCL is proud to be part of this coalition.

Human Rights Watch releases long awaited report on child labor – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

The National Consumers League welcomes Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) long-awaited report Fields of Peril – Child Labor in US Agriculture. HRW is a longtime and invaluable partner with NCL and the Child Labor Coalition in pressing for protections for farmworker kids in the United States.

HRW’s report is an update from its 2000 “Fingers to the Bone: United States Failure to Protect Child Farmworkers,” and the conclusions from the 2009 report are all the more sobering because, as HRW concluded, “Shockingly, we found that conditions for child farmworkers in the United States remain virtually as they were a decade ago.”

NCL co-chairs the Child Labor Coalition with the American Federation of Teachers. The CLC is the only coalition of its kind in the US that brings together organizations dedicated to eradicating child labor, both in the US and abroad. Our domestic priority, led by our child labor director Reid Maki, is the adoption of the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment or CARE Act, which will give the same child labor protections to farmworker kids that all other kids enjoy.

HRW interviewed 59 children in 14 states. What they found is that children who work picking crops toil in the fields at far younger ages, for far longer hours, and under far more hazardous conditions than all other working children. As the report notes, this means:

an end to childhood, long hours at exploitative wages, and risk to their health and sometimes their lives. Although their families’ financial need helps push children into the fields – poverty among farmworkers is more than double that of all wage and salary employees– the long hours and demands of farmwork result in high-drop-out rates from school. Without a diploma, child workers are left with few options besides a lifetime of farmwork and the poverty that accompanies it.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which regulates child labor, children in agriculture receive much less protection than children working in other jobs. Under the law, on small farms with parental permission, outside of school hours, there is no minimum age for workers. Children ages 12 and 13 can work for any size farm with their parents’ consent outside of school hours; children 14 and 15 can work on any size farm without parental consent outside of school hours; there are no restrictions on employing children ages 16 and older, including in hazardous agricultural occupations.

By comparison, kids doing nonagricultural work are prohibited from almost all jobs—except for baby sitting, delivering newspapers, and a few other rare exceptions—when they are under age 14, and children ages 14 and 15 may work only in certain jobs designated by the Secretary of Labor and only for limited hours outside of school. Children in nonagricultural jobs are also prohibited from performing hazardous work before age 18.

The condition of farmworker kids in the United States is a national disgrace. These kids don’t get the education they need to break out of this cycle of poverty. But their situation is not really so different from the condition of children working in factories, mines or bakeries in America at the turn of the 20th Century. Florence Kelley, in heading the NCL’s work back then, would have made the same arguments to authorities and poor  families that we are making today – get these kids out of the fields and into schools and they won’t end up as their parents are: still poor and without other employment options.  And while we are at it, let’s pay farmworkers a decent wage, ensure clean water and toilet facilities close to their worksite, and give them access to housing that is more than a shack with an outdoor toilet.

We are indebted to our colleagues at HRW, Jo Becker and Zama Coursen-Neff, for this excellent new report, which should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers and legislators across the United States.

Even educational programs deceive consumers, and even consumer advocates are taken in – National Consumers League

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By Courtney Brein, NCL Food Safety and Nutrition fello

I love the issues on which I focus as the Linda Golodner Food Safety and Nutrition Fellow, and I really enjoy working at NCL, but I also eventually plan to return to school to pursue a higher degree. With my future plans in mind, I decided that it made sense to take the requisite standardized test this spring, which would enable me to apply to graduate school at any point in the next five years (after that point, scores expire). A month or so ago, I began spending a few hours each weekend doing practice problems, figuring that this method of preparation, which I have employed to ready myself for past standardized tests, would be sufficient. Hoping to experience a more realistic version of the test than the paper and pencil problems from my test prep book allow, I located a free online practice test, to be administered during a live, web-based “classroom” session provided by a certain not-to-be-mentioned test prep company (two syllables, starts with a “k,” ends with an “n”).

Several Saturdays ago, I logged into the webpage previously provided by the test prep company, listened to the instructor’s shpiel, and took the practice test. The actual test is computer adaptive, meaning that the test-taker receives harder or easier questions depending on whether she answered the previous question correctly; this test, however, was not. During the 25-minute talk, through which the attendees had to sit following the practice exam in order to receive our scores, the instructor assured us that – even though the test we took was not computer adaptive – it was an extremely accurate predictor of the score we would each have received, had we taken the real test that day. He repeated this several times, both before and after the scores were released. Not surprisingly, much of the talk focused on the various test-prep courses offered by the not-to-be-mentioned company, and how these courses would improve each of our scores.

When I viewed my score, I was alarmed. I had not scored nearly as well as my practice problem results and pencil-and-paper diagnostic test suggested that I would. What was I to do? Based on this exam, I would do not receive the score I wanted – and felt I needed – if I were to take the real test without a meaningful, strategic study plan. As the instructor droned on about the various course offerings provided by K—-n, and the fact that each option guaranteed students a higher score, it seemed to me that I had no other option than to enroll. The following morning, I signed up for K—n’s online course – the cheapest offering, but one that still cost a pretty penny.

Lo and behold, when I took the computer adaptive diagnostic exam – my first step as an enrollee in the expensive prep course – that determines the official score that K—-n uses as a baseline in demonstrating a student’s improvement between enrollment and test day, I did not score as I had the previous evening. This time I scored much higher, achieving the target score I had originally set for myself, a score I would be more than happy to submit to graduate programs.

Given the significant discrepancy between my two scores, I cannot help but believe that the following took place: To entice me to purchase its products, K—-n provided me (and thousands of other prospective students) with a free exam designed to suggest that I (and thousands of other prospective students) would perform at a level below that of competitive applicants, were I to take the test without further preparation. Yet, according to a more representative version of the exam – available only after purchasing course materials – I would actually score toward the upper end of the range achieved by successful applicants to my desired program.

In the end, of course, the fault lies with me. I took the instructor’s insistence about the accuracy of the free diagnostic test at face value, trusting that a company with the goal of educating youths and young adults would not engage in deceptive practices just to earn a buck (or, in this case, many, many bucks). In this situation, however, I faced an enormous information imbalance, skewed in the direction of the test prep company. They had access to computer adaptive exams; I did not. They knew the accuracy (or lack thereof) of their free diagnostic test; I did not. They had hundreds of thousands of success stories on which to draw; I had no reason to assume they’d deceived any prospective students before, and therefore operated under the assumption that I could trust the diagnostic score they’d generated for me.
This experience taught me a lesson that one can never learn too many times as a consumer advocate, or as a consumer in the marketplace. There nearly always exists an imbalance of information between company and consumer; the company knows everything (or almost everything) about its product or services, while the consumer knows only what the company chooses to tell her and what she can find out on her own. While K—-n’s deceptive behavior is not acceptable, consumer deception is not unique to K—-n, or really all that surprising. As a consumer, it is my job – and yours – to remain alert, inquisitive, and slightly dubious in the marketplace; to “trust but verify”; and to do my due diligence before making a significant purchase.

So, if it does nothing for my exam score, at least my overpriced, unnecessary K—-n test prep course will have taught me something. In the meantime, I’ll work my way through the practice materials, mostly because I paid for them.

Consumer groups advocating for import safety – National Consumers League

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by Sally Greenbreg, NCL Executive Director

Too often in the past, when products imported into the United States by foreign manufacturers proved dangerous to American consumers, these consumers found themselves without a remedy. The Chinese drywall product disaster is a case in point: hundreds of thousands of homes across the United States were built with Chinese drywall that has disintegrated and given off dangerous chemical fumes, forcing homeowners to abandon their homes.

Last month, eight consumer groups, including NCL, signed a letter in support of the Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act, HR 4678, sponsored by Rep Betty Sutton (D-OH). The bill will help consumers harmed by unsafe foreign products get redress for their injuries. Foreign manufacturers will have to post a bond to cover liability should their products prove dangerous and will be required to name an agent in the United States to take service of process.

Allergies 1: Mimi 0 – how I’m preparing for next year’s re-match – National Consumers League

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By Mimi Johnson, NCL’s Director, Health Policy

It seems this year, there’s little I can do to beat the tree pollen. Allergy sufferers everywhere are plagued with itchy eyes, stuffy noses, and tight chests. According to experts, the wet season and early, warm spring led to a breeding ground for allergens.

Aside from keeping windows closed, keeping the house – and myself – clean of pollen, and trying to avoid the outdoors in the early hours of the day, I’ve also tried a variety of treatments. With allergies, symptoms – and pollen – vary throughout the season. While it’s important to follow a treatment plan and take medications as prescribed, it can be a real challenge during allergy season as symptoms, treatments, weather, and pollen counts are often changing.

One thing I’ve learned this allergy season, however, is the value of keeping a diary of my trials and tribulations. I’ve documented – on a somewhat daily basis – how my medication regimen and the weather are making me feel. This “diary” proved to be very useful when meeting with my doctor at a recent appointment.

Though there is little to do but ride it out and try to minimize the symptoms with a variety of over-the-counter and prescription products, next winter I can work together with my doctor to develop a regimen … well in advance of the first trace of pollen!

Whether you’re sick with allergies or the flu, or you’re caring for someone else who is feeling under the weather, you can help improve your immediate and longer-term care by keeping track of the symptoms, reactions to medication, and your thoughts along the way.

What would Kagan mean for consumers and workers? – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

So Elena Kagan is the President’s pick for Supreme Court Justice? Kagan is the current Solicitor General of the United States, and she brings a wealth of credentials to the Court – but what does her nomination mean for NCL’s constituency, consumers and workers?

That’s hard to know because Kagan has never served as a judge and therefore has no “paper trail” of decisions revealing her judicial philosophy. Nan Aron, head of the Alliance for Justice, on whose board NCL sits, is backing the nomination. The Alliance statement says that Kagan “will bring to the Court a respect for core constitutional values and a willingness to stand up for the rights of ordinary Americans. Her appointment also represents an historic step forward as women continue to take their rightful place on the highest court in the land.” The AFJ statement goes on to say “…we urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to use the confirmation process to directly address the bread-and-butter issues that come before the Court and which affect the lives and livelihoods of the American people.”

NCL agrees with that sentiment, but we still don’t know much about Kagan’s thinking on forced mandatory arbitration in consumer contracts, or consumer access to the courts that has been severely eroded in states across the country by so-called tort reform measures capping damages or statutes of limitations on faulty products. Or on worker health and safety, their pensions or their right to organize.

The Service Employees Union International, SEIU, which has a seat on the NCL Board of Directions, said about Kagan: “As the daughter of a public school teacher and a lawyer who defended the rights of tenants, Elena Kagan understands first-hand the direct impact courts have on people’s lives. Her commitment to fairness and to justice for everyday people has earned her respect across the ideological spectrum.

The SEIU statement goes on to say:

“The people deserve justices like Kagan – justices whose allegiance to equal justice and the rule of law trumps politics and corporate influence. And, nothing could be more important than restoring the Court’s commitment to these principles.”

This morning’s New York Times also noted that Kagan’s brother was a union organizer and both her brothers are schoolteachers in New York City today, and presumably union members.

We agree with both the Alliance for Justice and SEIU that Kagan has promise as someone who will support the rights of consumers and workers, but as the Times editorial, headlined “Searching for Elena Kagan”  asks, “where precisely, has Ms. Kagan been during the legal whirlwinds of the last few years, as issues like executive power, same sex marriage, the rights of the accused and the proper application of the death penalty have raged through the courts?. .. Her positions are unclear- or possibly to the right of Justice Stevens.”

This president is putting his faith in Kagan to be a Supreme Court justice who embodies his ideals. During the campaign, he described how we would choose nominees to the high Court: 

And we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges. 

We will see in the days to come – and if she is confirmed, from her service on the court, whether Elena Kagan meets the President’s test. NCL hopes she does – the rights and protections of workers and consumers depend on it.

DC schools nutrition bill aims high – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

This week, the District of Columbia will likely enact the toughest, most directive legislation among the 50 states  regulating school nutrition and physical education standards. The bill will restrict calories on breakfast and lunch, limit the fat and sodium in the foods served to kids, and only non-fat or low-fat low sugar milks will be served. Lunches and breakfasts will be available for free to kids in need across the city, and a different fruit or vegetable – to give kids variety – will be served each day. Buying local produce will be emphasized.

This bill is exciting and even (dare I say it) radical, but how will DC pay for this sea change in school lunch and breakfast menus and greater access to free meals? Councilmember Mary Cheh – the bill’s sponsor – is proposing a penny-per-ounce tax on soda, which the spokeswoman for the DC Beverage Association is calling “nothing short of a money grab from working families and citizens of the District of Columbia.” But the beverage association better brace itself, because the bill appears to have the support of the majority of DC’s City Council and is likely to pass in some form. This bill also requires double the recess time built into the curriculum day for DC school students.

Councilmember Cheh’s bill is no doubt inspired by First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign to get kids eating healthier and getting out from behind their Game Boy’s and Nintendos and out on the playground kicking a ball or playing hopscotch. I also credit my friend Ed Bruske, whose column in the Washington Post a few months ago describing the DC School lunch program, the contents of the food, and how kids respond to it provided a look into the DC school lunch program — and it wasn’t pretty.

Pediatric over-the-counter medication recall – National Consumers League

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One of Johnson and Johnson’s divisions – McNeil Consumer Healthcare – has issued a large voluntary recall of several different over-the-counter medications for infants and children.  Federal regulators determined there were manufacturing deficiencies at the company’s facility, resulting in the recall of 43 different products including Tylenol, Motrin, Zyrtec, and Benadryl.

The Food and Drug Administration is recommending parents and caregivers stop using the affected products, but it is important to note that they have said they don’t believe there will be any serious health problems linked to the recall.

McNeil and the FDA are currently working to figure out when the problem first arose; at this point, they can only say that the problem probably began a while ago.  McNeil issued a statement, which indicated that some of the products in the recall ‘may have higher concentrations of active ingredients than specified, while others may contain inactive ingredients that do not meet internal testing requirements, and others may contain tiny particles’.

Visit McNeil’s Web site for a complete list of the products being recalled.  Contact the FDA if a child who has taken any of the recalled medications any unexpected symptoms.

For alternative solutions, talk to your doctor or pharmacist.  While generic versions of the affected medicines can be used, it is important to remember that adult versions of medications should not be given to infants and children.