We live, we learn – or maybe we don’t.
In the first part I mentioned the Cronobacter case in the US and finished with mentioning the Listeria-contaminated Wilke sausage. Let’s stay with the Wilke case to see if there are commonalities between the competent authorities’ failures in the US and Germany.
We’ll start with some background information: It was in October 2019 when the sausage manufacturing company Wilke in Hesse had to stop production due to two deaths caused by Listeria in the Wilke sausages. Two days later, the company went into receivership. The state attorney filed a case for manslaughter. In total, the tainted sausages had led to at least 37 serious illnesses and the two aforementioned deaths. The sausages were sold to over 1000 customers, including homes for the elderly and hospitals. The hygienic conditions in the factory were “substandard” to say it politely. There is a video report by the local TV station in German language – the images speak for themselves though. And similar to the Cronobacter case in the US, the competent authorities knew about the disastrous hygienic conditions since August of that year, and it took them more than two months to take action. And of course, after the scandal became public, local and regional content authorities blamed each other for not taking action. Again, here we have a breakdown of communication or, potentially, even worse, the competent authorities turning a blind eye. And the latter assumption is supported by the fact that it took a court judgement to get the competent authorities to release a list of companies to which the Wilke products were sold.
Today, three years after the pathogen scandal, little has changed. German foodwatch alleges that the local competent authorities have a conflict of interest as they have to balance between the jobs in the region and food control. But foodwatch does not mention the conflict of interest as the the only issue. In addition, they state that the results of these controls are not made publicly available, and that the number of food inspectors is too low. The latter is a point that has been raised many times. According to a German broadsheet, a report commissioned after the scandal by the local government in Hesse found that the Wilke company was not audited by inspectors, despite the fact that according to its risk categorisation, it should have been inspected once per month. It was not even checked if the company had a self-control mechanism in place.
Reading the novel by Upton Sinclair, mentioned in my previous post, and the articles on Wilke and Abbott suggest that we have not learned much in the past 110 years when it comes to handling food safety issues and balancing industry interests.
And the striking similarities between the Cronobacter case in the US and the Listeria case in Germany are the lack of communication between inspectors and competent authorities at local, regional and national level on the one hand, and the hesitant actions by the competent authorities after the wrongdoings became known to them on the other hand.
In the third and last part of the blog we will look at how these issues can be handled better, faster and more effectively. We will talk about some competent authorities in Europe that could serve as good examples.
UPDATE (2023-02-16)
According to the state attorney from Kassel (Germany), 11 persons have died due to listeria contamination in sausages from Wilke. The state attorney accuses the former managing director of Wilke, his deputy and the head of production for bringing listeria-contaminated sausage to the market, causing or contributing to the death of eleven consumers.
