U.S. Food Safety: The Import Alarm Keep...(t was the source of the 2003 green onion...),Health

In their report, filed in December 2003, agency inspectors said they observed dirty runoff from the farm workers' windowless, mud-floored shacks and crude showers seeping directly onto fields where produce was grown. Photos of the site "show evidence of soiled diapers, soiled feminine hygiene products, and domestic waste" lying nearby, according to the report.

The growing fields were irrigated with water from a pond that was also a dumping ground for human sewage and animal manure. During processing, green onions typically passed through the hands of at least six workers, the FDA team said, and there was no evidence that workers were allowed time off for illness. While the firm purported to wash all onions in chlorinated water, it could produce no evidence to back that claim.

The Problem With China

The Chi-Chi's outbreak has been just one of many, and, in 2007, the focus shifted from Mexico to China.

The pet food scandal, as well as a stream of toy and other recalls in 2007, spurred negotiations between U.S. officials and their counterparts in China, which exported $4.2 billion worth of food to America last year -- much of it in the form of ubiquitous processed food ingredients such as wheat gluten or ascorbic acid.

While no major outbreaks of human foodborne illness tied to Chinese products have occurred recently, they're not unlikely in the future, Hubbard said. Much of the food in China that's destined for U.S. dinner tables is grown and processed by mom-and-pop producers with little or no oversight, he said.

"What they've got is this vast cottage industry of producers making this stuff. Sometimes you might have a producer making just five or six sacks of flour per week in
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