Who's to blame for foodborne illness outbreaks

Transcript

NIALA: Good morning! Welcome to Axios Today!

It’s Wednesday, May 31st.

I’m Niala Boodhoo.

Today on the show: Moscow is the target of a major drone attack.

But first: sick workers are often behind foodborne illness outbreaks… but who’s to blame? That’s today’s One Big Thing.

NIALA: It's been 30 years since E. coli came into the public consciousness with a deadly outbreak linked to undercooked hamburgers at Jack in the Box restaurants. It made hundreds of people ill, especially children, and killed four.

Now, new data tells us sick workers are linked to 40% of foodborne illness outbreaks at restaurants and food chains across the country.That's according to a study released yesterday by the CDC looking at the years 2017 to 2019.

Northeastern University's Dr. Darin Detweiler is a food policy expert. He also lost his 16-month old son to that 1993 e-coli outbreak, through exposure to another infected child. Dr. Detweiler, thank you so much for coming to talk to us.

DARIN DETWEILER: You're welcome.

NIALA: Can we talk about the latest, what's the most common food borne illness outbreak that we're seeing today?

DARIN: We're seeing a good number of listeria and salmonella and even norovirus outbreaks. But I think that one of the changes we've seen definitely over the last three decades is when we were looking at this issue three decades ago, we were typically talking about foods regulated by the USDA, meat and poultry.

Today more outbreaks and more recalls are tied to foods that are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Produce, manufactured foods. We're seeing food not just tied to restaurants or retail, but also foods tied to other sources, such as food trucks and ghost kitchens. And so many different ways in which people are getting foods are really causing some challenges for state and county health departments.

NIALA: Is it surprising to you that so many illnesses can often be linked back to just one sick worker?

DARIN: Not quite a surprise when you look at the idea of there are so many different steps in food's journey from the farm to the fork, as we often say. And that last mile of food's journey is extremely critical, uh, not just in terms of temperatures and refrigeration and cross-contamination, but also the health of those who are handling the food.

NIALA: So about 44% of managers told the CDC their restaurants provided paid sick leave to workers. What should we make of that?

DARIN: That seems to be a common message that we hear, but what we're not hearing is like, is there enough staff available to accommodate for when an employee is not able to be there? When we're looking at the idea of some of those policies, are those policies in place for those who have been there for less than three months, less than six months, because, you know, pathogens and viruses and bacteria, they don't discriminate based on if you've been there long enough or you're senior enough to be able to take time off for that kind of a situation.

NIALA: Dr. Detweiler, it's been 30 years since the outbreak that killed your son, which, I should say, we are very sorry for your loss.

DARIN: I appreciate that.

NIALA: Do you think that the industry has made progress since then over the past three decades?

DARIN: I definitely think that progress has been made. But you know, the numbers have remained relatively consistent. For three decades, we've heard 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and some 3000 Americans die. But beyond statistics, I regularly talk with families whose children are in the hospital or who have buried a child due to foodborne illness. And year after year, I keep hearing the same phrase. It's 2019, it's 2020, it's 2023, whatever the year is. It's the United States of America. I thought we were past this. How is this still a thing?

People talking about, there must have been changes in policies, there must have been changes in science. When we talk about employee safety like this, it's not about laws. It's not about court cases, it's not about science and technology. It really is about corporate policy and corporate culture around the idea of employees who are in any capacity working with food should not be doing so when they're sick. Worst case scenario: A, on one end, you literally can have a family that's gonna live with a chair forever empty at their family table.

On the other end, you have a sick employee who thought they were doing everything that was right and they're gonna have to live with the consequences just as much as the company. In most cases, the company's just gonna move on. But that employee, they may be fired, they may be banned from working for other companies, but they will always live with the guilt in terms of the fact that they played some role in someone being harmed.

NIALA: So where do you think the responsibility for this lies? Is it with corporations?

DARIN: Definitely, there needs to be a responsibility that is expected of leaders within a company to make sure that their policies are not bare minimum, or something that satisfies a local law, just because a state doesn't support the idea of earned sick leave, doesn't mean that a company can't make the decision to go above and beyond that and provide an actual environment in which sick employees either A, are able to get their Hepatitis A vaccine; B, have access to resources, whether that be, monetary or just, here is a nurse on site kind of a situation, or here is a, a service we provide in terms of making sure that they're healthy.

When we talk about corporate social responsibility, it's not taking responsibility after the fact that matters. A true measure of corporate responsibility is those executives who take responsibility before they have no other option.

NIALA: Dr. Darin Detweiler is a professor of food policy and corporate social responsibility at Northeastern University in Boston. Thanks for being with us, Dr. Detweiler.

DARIN: Thank you very much.

NIALA: In a moment, drone strikes in Moscow and the latest on the war.

NIALA: Welcome back to Axios Today, I'm Niala Boodhoo. Russian officials say at least eight drones attacked Moscow yesterday morning in the largest scale attack on the city since the war began. Two people were injured and three apartment buildings were damaged. Russia's defense ministry blames Ukraine for the attack, a claim which Ukraine denies. Axios Axios Senior World reporter, Dave Lawler has been following this story. Hi, Dave.

DAVE LAWLER: Hi Niala.

NIALA: Does this attack signal a shift in the war? This is the second drone attack we've seen in Moscow in recent weeks.

DAVE: Yeah, so we had the previous attack over the Kremlin, which was really a shocking scene to see these drones exploding in the, you know, skies right over the Kremlin. Now we have a broader attack on Moscow that these drones were either shot down or came down in residential areas of Moscow. And so, the shift, you know, between those two is that perhaps this is coming closer to Russian civilians, to people in Moscow who've been shielded to a large degree from the war next door in Ukraine, except of course they felt sanctions to a certain degree, et cetera. But life has gone on more or less as normal in Moscow. And so, this came immediately after large scale attacks in Kyiv. We did see some kind of Ukrainian commentators talking about a sort of a dose of their own medicine kind of thing that this is now happening in Moscow. Although, as you mentioned, the damage was relatively minimal, from these strikes.

NIALA: Why is Ukraine denying responsibility for this?

DAVE: Yeah, so this is really a tricky issue for the US and Ukraine. The US has discouraged Ukraine from conducting attacks on Russian soil, at least attacks that involve US supplied weaponry. So we don't know if that's the case with these particular drones, but the US has been quite cautious about anything on the other side of the border because they're worried that Russia will escalate in response. So Niala I don't think we should overstate it in this incident that we're gonna have tactical nuclear weapons all of a sudden on the table. But there is a concern that you have larger and larger attacks inside Russia, especially anything that seems to threaten Putin or the Kremlin itself, that maybe they will in return start to look at, Broader attacks, either on Ukraine or on whoever's supplying the weapons that are being used to conduct the attacks inside Russia. So there is a broader concern of where this could lead if this is just the start of a trend.

NIALA: And in the meantime, what are the implications for Russian citizens seeing this?

DAVE: Yeah, so there's two different things happening now. One is that we saw this kind of crazy raid last week with paramilitary groups crossing the border and conducting attacks inside Russia in border areas quite close to Ukraine. We've also seen some strikes along the border there, so those areas were already being impacted more and more by the fighting in recent weeks. Now you have Moscow coming under direct attack for the first time in the war, at least civilian areas in Moscow and so, you know, I saw some quotes from Muscovites saying, we never thought it would happen here. You know, we feel like there's some distance between us and the war. And so that could be one factor here, that kind of the distance between ordinary Russians and the war that's being fought in their name next door could shrink a little bit as you see attacks directly affecting Russian civilians.

NIALA: Dave Lawler is a senior world reporter at Axios. Thanks, Dave.

DAVE: Thanks Niala.

That’s it for us today.

I’m Niala Boodhoo, thanks for listening, thanks also to Emily Peck and Margaret Talev for filling in for me while I was out…stay safe and we’ll see you back here tomorrow morning.