ADISON, Conn. -- It's a good rule of thumb that technological solutions work better than increased regulation. Before 1920, thousands of babies died annually in New York and other large American cities from drinking contaminated milk. The solution wasn't more Federal dairy inspectors or a merger of Government agencies. It was pasteurization.
The solution to the problem of food poisoning -- whether the food involved is hamburger, strawberries, raspberries, cider or some other product susceptible to bacterial contamination -- has been sitting on the shelf for most of 40 years while hundreds of thousands of Americans have been sickened and thousands have died. It is the equivalent of pasteurization, and its neglect is a disgrace.
The technology is food irradiation. The Army pioneered its development beginning in 1943, and it has since passed into commercial application in some 40 countries, including limited use in the United States.
Irradiation uses gamma rays from a solid radioactive source to disrupt the DNA of, and thus to kill, noxious bacteria, parasites, mold and fungus in and on agricultural products. Gamma rays are similar to microwaves and X-rays.
Irradiation doesn't make food radioactive, nor does it noticeably change taste, texture or appearance. Depending on dose and on whether the food is packaged to prevent recontamination, irradiation can retard spoilage, kill germs or even completely preserve. The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association and the American Veterinary Medical Association all endorse the process.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved irradiation of pork, poultry, fruits, vegetables, spices and grains, although its use remains limited. Most imported spices are preserved with irradiation. Tropical fruits like mango and papaya from Hawaii are treated to kill exotic pests. Irradiated chicken is served in hospitals in the Southeast. Astronauts aboard the space shuttle eat irradiated food, including steak.
Food irradiation would have prevented the illnesses caused recently by contaminated hamburger from Hudson Foods and the several deaths linked to Jack in the Box restaurants in the Northwest in 1993. It could kill the salmonella that infects up to 60 percent of the poultry and eggs sold in the United States; the deadly mutant E. coli strain 0157:H7, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have characterized as a major emerging infectious disease, and such ugly stowaways as beef tapeworms, fish parasites and the nematodes that cause trichinosis in pork.
Yet the new meat inspection system now being phased in by the United States Department of Agriculture does not even mention, much less mandate, irradiation. Neither Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman nor the Food and Drug Administration invoked food irradiation as asolution to the Hudson Foods situation, preferring instead to press for destruction of 25 million pounds of meat that could have been made edible with the technique.
A petition for authorization to irradiate red meat has languished at the F.D.A. since 1994. Several states, including New York, have responded to pressure from citizen groups by either banning or imposing a moratorium on the sale of irradiated food without reviewing scientific evidence of the technology's safety and value.
Why the gap between promise and application? Because food irradiation -- like cancer treatment, medical diagnostics, sterilization of medical disposables, aircraft maintenance and many other technologies -- uses radioactivity, which Americans have been taught to fear. Commercial irradiators use metallic cesium-137 or cobalt-60 as sources of gamma radiation in heavily shielded processing plants; when the radioactive sources are not being used to sanitize food, they are stored safely underground.
Some anti-nuclear and environmental groups have campaigned against food irradiation, even imagining a conspiracy among the Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization and the nuclear power industry to use the process to dispose of nuclear waste.
Similarly fanatic resistance plagued the introduction of vaccination, water chlorination, pasteurization and fluoridation -- comparable technologies that have reduced disease and saved millions of lives. The unsupported fears of the Luddite opposition are making people suffer needlessly.
Mr. Glickman has said that the Hudson Foods case highlights the need to better educate the public on how to prepare food properly, but we can't all become sterile technicians at home.
Thermometers won't protect us from E. coli-contaminated alfalfa sprouts. Public health has been a primary responsibility of Government for more than a century. Inspection and testing alone, however responsibly applied, can never assure consumer safety where invisible pathogens are concerned.
Pasteurization saved the babies. Irradiation can save our food.
Richard Rhodes is the author of "Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague" and "The Making of the Atomic Bomb."
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