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this without being checked on. Integrity and honesty is not part of the for profit business model.
Now an entire town will fail because of management laziness.

NYTimes
An elevated view looking down on the Boar's Head processing plant.
Boar’s Head announced that it would close the plant in Jarratt, Va., indefinitely.Credit...Steve Helber/Associated Press
Boar’s Head announced on Friday that it would indefinitely shut down the troubled Virginia deli meat plant that it acknowledged had caused a deadly listeria outbreak, killing nine people and sickening dozens more in 18 states.

The company also said it had identified liverwurst processing as the source of contamination and would permanently discontinue the product.

“Given the seriousness of the outbreak, and the fact that it originated at Jarratt, we have made the difficult decision to indefinitely close this location,” the company said in a statement posted on its website Friday. The shutdown affects about 500 workers in Jarratt, Va., a small rural town whose economic livelihood largely depended on the plant’s business.

Federal inspectors had repeatedly found health and sanitation violations at the plant.

“In response to the inspection records and noncompliance reports at the Jarratt plant, we will not make excuses,” the company said in a statement.
Two years ago, inspectors conducted an extensive review and concluded that conditions at the plant — rife with mold, rust and holes in walls — posed an “imminent threat” to food safety. That finding could have resulted in a warning letter or even a suspension of production there, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture did not take strict measures and allowed the plant to stay open until this outbreak forced a suspension in production in late July.

New federal records released on Friday reveal that inspectors who went into the plant after the outbreak found the company had inadequate controls to prevent the bacterial contamination from spreading and had no written plans for employees to safeguard against cross-contamination.

They tested for listeria in various places and found one positive result on equipment used to move ready-to-eat products. The findings were in an area that food-safety experts consider critical to keep clean: the zone of the plant where food has passed through the cooking step and is on its way to delivery trucks.

In July, Boar’s Head started recalling its lunch meats, after health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to trace hospitalizations that now number 57, as well as nine deaths of people 70 and older, back to the meats produced at the site.

At first, the recall involved only liverwurst, a lunch meat made of ground-up pig livers, and other deli items on the same line. But then it expanded on July 29 to all meats from the plant, and the company paused production there. The C.D.C. said the listeria strain that health officials found in liverwurst bought at retail outlets in Maryland and New York also matched the bacteria found in sick patients who reported eating other types of deli meat.
This is the largest outbreak of listeria infections since an outbreak in 2011 linked to cantaloupe, which killed 33 people, according to the C.D.C.

Jonathan Williams, communications director for the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 400, which represents about 500 workers at the plant, said the plant’s closing was “especially unfortunate” because he believed the outbreak was “not the fault of the work force.”

The company, he said, was providing severance packages and relocation to the employees. Boar’s Head gave employees the option to continue to work at the other Virginia processing center that the company operates in Petersburg, about 40 minutes away, or to transfer to others, he said. The company runs facilities in Michigan, Indiana, New York and Arkansas.

The Jarratt shutdown has already started affecting local businesses, like the CornerStone Crossroads, which used to sell cheeseburgers to about 100 plant workers every day.

But inspectors had cited violations of health and safety regulations time and again. Boar’s Head, like other deli meat producers, does not follow the strictest listeria measures outlined in Agriculture Department rules in 2015, such as adding an extra “kill step” to either irradiate or smash the deli meat to kill bacteria. Another option is to use an additive like citric acid to inhibit bacterial growth.
Instead, the plant relied on testing for bacteria and sanitation alone to ensure the safety of its food. Given the records that have been made public in recent weeks, Neal Fortin, director of the Institute for Food Laws & Regulations at Michigan State University, said he was surprised that the U.S.D.A. allowed the plant to operate with such a flawed safety plan.

“You see multiple failures here — failures in design, failures in implementation,” he said. “It’s just shocking.”

With the outbreak, various federal and local agencies have been investigating the sources of listeria contamination and the company’s methods to limit the spread of bacteria.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/health/boars-head-shutdown-listeria-deaths.html