S.T.O.P. - Safe Tables Our Priority

Comments by Karen Taylor Mitchell

S.T.O.P. Executive Director
September 23, 2025
Washington, DC

Ten years ago this week, the nation's highest ranking food safety official took food safety a giant step forward by making it illegal to sell ground hamburger containing deadly E. coli O157:H7. It was a move that was met with great hope from victims and families whose lives had been ruined by foodborne disease, as it seemed to promise the dawn of a new era of crackdown on preventable foodborne illnesses from the highest levels of our government. S.T.O.P., the organization founded by those victims and families, is here today because that promise has not been fulfilled. As a result, our food safety net remains full of holes, and millions of American children and adults are falling through these holes each year. Many are falling through into crippling permanent illnesses, and too many to excruciating and untimely deaths.

We're here today to ask the presidential candidates and all other candidates running for elected office, to finally "Step Up to the Plate" and make a rock-solid commitment to stopping the preventable tragedy of diseases being distributed to America's most vulnerable populations through America's food supply.

This nation has seen an unprecedented array of threats to food safety in recent years. Bioterrorism is never far from American's minds these days. Even as the threat of intentional poisonings hangs over our heads, we are already seeing daily devastating health results of a food system that scholars say has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40 thousand and that now routinely distributes contamination over thousands of miles. Just last year, the largest known outbreak of produce-related Hepatitis ever sickened over 600 people and killed at least 3 - a toll very near that of the Jack in the Box hamburger catastrophe that prompted the aforementioned. Quickly following on that disaster this year was another five-state produce related outbreak, plus the discovery of the first mad cow inside American borders. Meanwhile, behind the sporadic headlines, the systematic distribution of E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter and other illnesses through meat, poultry, eggs, and other foods carries on, sickening unimaginable numbers of people and causing the same amount of economic distress as Hurricane Charley. The difference between this and a hurricane is that America's policymakers can stop foodborne disease.

Let me tell you a bit about the devastation of foodborne disease. 76 million people ill, every year. 914 people hospitalized, every day. 14 deaths, every day. Your chances of getting a foodborne disease this year are one in three. If you're healthy, there's a good chance you'll shake it off after a day or a week of misery. If it's your child, your elderly parent, or someone who's immunocompromised or pregnant, your chances are much worse. The photos you see around the room are of people who were not among the lucky ones.

Two to three percent of people who get a foodborne disease will end up with long-term health complications because of it. That's more than 2 million people each year. Foodborne disease is the leading cause of acute kidney failure in American children. It is one of two leading causes of reactive arthritis. It is a key clinical predecessor to acute infectious paralysis called Guillain Barre Syndrome. It causes blindness, diabetes, neurological disorders, learning disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, miscarriages, stillbirths, heart attacks, strokes - the list goes on and on. But the key word to remember is preventable. These illnesses, and these dire consequences, are almost always preventable by keeping filth - and quite literally, crap - out of our food.

Roughly as many children die of foodborne disease every year as die from gunshots. Roughly as many children die of foodborne disease each year as die of cancer. This may be surprising to you and there's a reason for that. Where there hasn't been nearly enough action on foodborne disease in the past decade, there has been an overabundance of public relations "spin". Too often, regulators, and in particular the US Department of Agriculture, have responded not by making food safer, but by assuring the public it's safer. How else can you explain press releases issued by USDA annually from the late 1990's until recently that assure the public that meat is becoming less contaminated with absolutely no evidence showing a nationwide reduction in pathogen loads? How else can you explain the fact that this Secretary of Agriculture's stated in March of 2003 that meat safety regulations are the cultural equivalent of the Model T automobile, yet in the two years following her Department has opposed all proposed Congressional reforms? How else can you explain the introduction of a $18 million dollar animal tracking system that completely omits almost every pathogen of human health interest? How else can you explain the increasing refusal of USDA to even hold meaningful meetings with consumer groups and journalists to discuss these issues?

It's been too easy for our highest government officials to talk the talk on food safety but not walk the walk. Instead they do nothing meaningful. Or in the case of our current president, to remain completely silent while millions of Americans suffer. We've come here today to demand more than the bland and meaningless assurances which victims and the American public have been given lately. We're asking for four specific commitments from every candidate for President.

These commitments are described in your press packets, and S.T.O.P.'s next speaker, Barbara Kowalcyk, will discuss them in further detail. Patricia Buck will follow explaining the need for bi-partisan support.

There's one message I want to leave you with, and that is, as journalists, ask these candidates specific questions. It's too easy to say "I support safe food" - after all, who doesn't? The key is in what action is taken - what specific reforms are made, and what access is given to consumer advocates and journalists like yourself to even ask the right questions.

Ten years ago, the nation's top food safety official took a giant leap forward for food safety. Where is that high-level commitment to safer food today? The official currently in that position supported the least possible protections to human health from the deadly threat of mad cow disease, according to a USDA whistleblower reported in the food industry trade press. In order to move forward, not backward, our nation needs a commitment to this critical domestic issue at the highest level. That is why, on behalf of the victims and the future victims of devastating foodborne disease, S.T.O.P. is demanding that all those who want to be the next President of the United States step up to the plate.