Parents of Sickened Children Ask for Tighter Rules on Food

By ELIZABETH BECKER

ASHINGTON, Oct. 16 — The parents tell similar accounts of children who suddenly fall ill with stomach aches, fever and diarrhea. In days, the children are in pediatric intensive care units, and doctors are explaining that the cause is E. coli bacteria, probably from tainted meat.

For Barbara and Michael Kowalcyk of Madison, Wis., the story ends in the death of their 2-year-old, Kevin, in August 2001.

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"He was begging us for water, for juice," Mrs. Kowalcyk said, "and we couldn't give it to him, because the doctors said he had to be partially dehydrated for his treatment. When he died, it was like an invisible truck ran over me."

Tom Brayton of Parsippany, N.J., watched his 20-month-old, Nicolaus, die in a matter of days in July 2000.

"The one thing I remember the most is Nicky's screaming nonstop for three days, and there was nothing I could do," Mr. Brayton recalled.

Elizabeth Tikriti, 11, of Yakima, Wash., survived her illness in 1997 by gritting her teeth through treatments without painkillers and trying hard not to fall asleep. "I was afraid I would never wake up," she said.

The families are part of a group here this week to lobby for improved safety regulations for meat and poultry after the nation's biggest meat recall. This week, Pilgrim's Pride, recalled 27.4 million pounds of ready-to-eat chicken and turkey products, fearing that they may carry Listeria monocytogenes bacteria.

Federal investigators said on Tuesday that the products were likely to have been a source of a listeria outbreak that killed seven people in seven Northeastern states.

ConAgra recalled 19 million pounds of ground beef in July, the third-largest recall. That meat was linked to the illnesses of 19 people in six Western and Midwestern states.

Every year, foodborne diseases cause an estimated 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. A spokesman for the Food and Safety and Inspection Service of the Agriculture Department, Steven Cohen, said that although the rates were too high they had been falling.

Pointing to the recent recalls, a group, Safe Tables Our Priority, said it would write to President Bush on Thursday asking for new rules for meat and poultry producers. They would include tough civil penalties for violations and authorizing the Agriculture Department to recall contaminated food.

"Our children and our families deserve not to encounter terror at the dinner table," the letter said. "We urge that you declare a war on foodborne illnesses."

The group asked that the department immediately adopt regulations for listeria inspections that President Bill Clinton initiated.

The group also supports a bill called Kevin's Law, after Mr. and Mrs. Kowalcyk's son. Its provisions include authorizing the department to close meat-processing plants that regularly fail to meet government food-safety standards.

"These people don't know what it is like to go over minute by minute what we did the week before Kevin died, not knowing where the meat came from and why it happened," said Mrs. Kowalcyk, a biostatistician at the University of Wisconsin.

A priority of the group is to crack down on the cow manure that finds its way into meat products and becomes a source of E. coli illness. Tracing tainted meat and poultry early and obtaining the full cooperation of meatpackers to identify that meat is another goal of the group. What it does not want, members of the group said, is to be faulted for their children's deaths.

"The meat companies let cow manure get in the meat, and then they tell the victims that if we had only cooked it to 160 degrees my child would not have died," Mrs. Kowalcyk said.

Rosemary Mucklow of the National Meat Association said that the industry did not need greater regulations but that consumers needed to be educated.

"The biggest issue is to get the consumer to cook the meat thoroughly," Ms. Mucklow said. "People don't like that. They say you're blaming the consumer. But you wash lettuce and grapes thoroughly."

The industry association, she said, has invested "huge amounts of effort and money to make the meat safe as it is being slaughtered."

To prevent illnesses from recalled products, the Agriculture Department advises pregnant women, older adults and people with weakened immune systems to reheat hot dogs and luncheon meats until steaming hot.

Recall details are available online at fsis.usda.gov or by calling (800) 535-4555.