Good afternoon.

My name is Laurie Girand, and I grew up, here, in California. Prior to 1996, the only feature of food that concerned me was how fresh or processed a food was; no one told me about bulging cans, raw fish or oysters, ground meat, undercooked eggs or unpasteurized juice. Then, in October 1996, (SLIDE) I was made painfully aware of hazards of food when my own daughter nearly died. I received a bedside education about bacteria that put a toxin into the bloodstream and shred a child's organs from the inside. I learned that other children, besides my daughter suffered as well. We were part of the Odwalla outbreak, which was identified in Washington, not California, and over half the victims were five years old and under. And I learned what many of you already knew: that a great deal of foodborne disease is preventable, that my own daughter's illness might have been completely preventable, that she didn't need to face a lifetime of adverse health.

Because of our family's experience, I jointed S.T.O.P. - Safe Tables Our Priority, a national, grassroots nonprofit of victims of foodborne illness, their family, friends and other concerned about the immediate threat to the public health by pathogens in foods. I am the Produce Programs Manager and a Board Member. My work for S.T.O.P. is strictly as an unpaid volunteer.

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S.T.O.P. has one mission: to prevent unnecessary illness, suffering, injury and death from foodborne illness. We believe California is beset with many challenges, which if treated with the urgency they deserve could prevent many lifethreatening illnesses and deaths in years to come.

From a consumer perspective, here are some of California's food safety needs:

1) We here today need to agree that we share a common enemy: pathogenic organisms that must be recognized as biohazards. This enemy takes advantage of delay or inaction, ignorance, sloppiness, negligence and occasionally fraud to harm and kill people, particularly the most vulnerable members of our society. In a laboratory, no one is allowed to handle these biohazards without training and proper precautions. Yet, on a farm, one can legally apply raw manure, even human waste, to fresh produce in the state of California. At S.T.O.P., I most often work with foods that are eaten uncooked such as lettuce, berries, sprouts and melon. Government recommendations to the contrary, science has shown that consumers cannot defend themselves from these biohazards by merely rinsing the excrement off of their fresh fruits and vegetables. It is therefore imperative that biohazards be stopped on the farm and at distribution points before they arrive in our homes. Being at the end of the farm-to-fork continuum, consumers can only be reactive, not proactive. Suggesting consumers should be held responsible for defending themselves against foodborne illness is like suggesting people should be held responsible for getting malaria because they don't adequately swat mosquitos when they land.

In acknowledging our common enemy, the Food Safety Task Force must recognize animal and human waste for what it really is: hazardous waste. In California, we have companies that want to irrigate human food crops with untreated human wastewater. We have companies that want to pump untreated wastewater underground and somehow imagine that the water will be magically transformed into drinking water by filtration through soil . In California, we have largely unregulated animal waste products left in mounds and lagoons all around the state. These are food and water contamination disasters waiting to happen as they did in Walkerton, Ontario this summer, as they did at the Albany, NY state fair last summer, as they did all over eastern North Carolina last summer. We can no longer ignore that human and animal waste is a byproduct that threatens our food and water, our environment, and the public's health and has a very real, human cost to the public.

2) We here today need to recognize that the single most powerful weapon we have in fighting these biohazards is accountability. All the industry education in the world is useless if we cannot identify who is growing, processing and distributing a specific food. Californians need mandatory registration of all participants growing, processing and distributing food. Just as laboratories and physicians must be trained in precautions before handling biohazards, all food producers, sellers and resellers should be educated about the dangers of pathogens. Californians need traceback and farm-of-origin mechanisms so that growers will know they are accountable. Californians also need information about taxpayer-financed government inspections to be made publicly available. In turn, we must reward businesses that consistently produce pathogen free and reduced products by encouraging them to market their products as superior. Without accountability along the food safety continuum, there is little incentive to change, and we cannot ensure that the weakest links in the chain will be strengthened or replaced. With accountability, consumers can make informed choices. And you can bet that however much a farmer wants to sell sheep from a flock exhibiting signs of BSE infection, there'd never be a market for the product if consumers could link the food to that farm.

3) We need to empower consumers to defend themselves as best they can. Consumers, particularly those most at-risk, must be given full and equal access to the food safety information known by government and industry. Real consumer education would focus on at-risk groups instead of using out-dated distribution channels that were established to teach people interested in learning about cooking, not food safety. Real consumer education would focus on parents, not children. Real consumer food safety education would accurately describe the grave consequences of foodborne illness, not gloss them over with costumed characters. Real consumer food safety education would state cearly that the only thing consumers can do to save their families is cooking their food, that merely rinsing with water is insufficient. Real consumer education would recognize the inherent conflict between a government pushing fresh fruit and vegetables for nutritional purposes and a government that should tell us that fresh fruit and vegetables, if contaminated, can kill more quickly than any pesticide. If government were interested in real consumer education, it would find a way to reach consumers to notify them about outbreaks and recalls instead of just issuing press releases.

4) We need regulators to collect complete, accurate data on who is getting sick from what, and it must be made publicly available. We need follow up data to ensure we are measuring the full cost to people's health. Surveillance data that doesn't measure Salmonella enteritidis where it is most often found, namely in Southern California, is nothing more than a shell game. We need mandatory illness reporting across all counties in the state, networked and computerized. We need state financed stool testing for all children with diarrheal illness. But we also need to ensure that claims of insufficient data, science and risk assessment are not used as delay and diversion tactics. While S.T.O.P. supports science-based food safety, we are opposed to the sacrifice of common sense on the altar of science. Risk assessment should accurately reflect the increasing risks across all foods and the increasing health costs of those who suffer and compare them with the level of risk thirty years ago.

5) We need to revolutionize California's outdated and uncoordinated food safety systems. The present separation of restaurant food regulation from on-farm and processing food safety is a senseless division of oversight, originating from arcane rulings about authority. Juices labeled with warnings in bottles are served without warnings in glasses. Hamburger sold with warnings in grocery stores is served rare without so much as a bat of the eye by a waiter. Counties inspect this, state inspects that, federal inspects the other. Food safety practices must be uniformly applied and coordinated from farm to fork.

6) By victim's standards, we do not perceive California to be a leader, but we need California to become a leader in food safety. While California's directives about food safety seek to eliminate resource duplication and waste, there is none that says that California must wait to have inferior and unevenly applied food safety rules dictated to it by federal government. Today, California creates guidance and then waits for the federal government to create real regulations. Labeling that could protect consumers languishes while awaiting FDA's stamp of approval. The most progressive legislation in food safety in this state in the last decade, restaurant temperature requirements, was pushed by consumers, not regulators. Every person working on food safety should be required to visit a child dying from E. coli O157:H7, listen to their cries, so that they can understand we don't have time for delay tactics, turf wars, empire building and passing the buck.

Lastly, as consumers, we insist that California food safety be funded by government, not by industry. Industry pays for activities and research that meet industry's priorities. Industry funds a significant portion of academia. We are here on an urgent matter of great importance for the public's health, not industry's health. Food safety must serve the public first.

In these meetings, we are taking an important first step toward improving the health of California's families and of the next generation. To truly win the war against these biohazards, we will certainly have to think "outside the box," and we may have to sacrifice some sacred cows. I challenge you to invent new systems that will work better than the old ones. As we go forward, I want you to assure you that any one person in this room today, YOU, CAN make a difference in food safety. Tomorrow, when you look in the mirror before you come to this meeting, don't ask yourself whether you can save a life with the work you are doing, but rather how many lives you can save.

Thank you very much.