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Mislabeling, lax oversight put children with allergies at risk

Food roulette

Chuck Berman
MCT

Peggy Pridemore helps son Patrick cut homemade chicken tenders. Due to his many food allergies, she has to be careful about what he eats.

Chuck Berman
MCT

Last December, Patrick Pridemore of Kentucky had a severe reaction after eating chicken nuggets that were labeled gluten-free.

CHICAGO — American children with food allergies are suffering life-threatening, and completely avoidable, reactions because manufacturers mislabel their products and regulators fail to police store shelves, a Chicago Tribune investigation has found.

The government and industry often take steps to properly label a product only after a child has been harmed.

The Tribune investigation revealed that the government rarely inspects food to find problems and doesn't punish companies that repeatedly violate labeling laws.

In disclosing ingredients, labels must clearly identify major allergens such as peanuts, milk, eggs and wheat. Millions of parents, teachers and baby-sitters scrutinize these labels to ensure that they are not giving children unsafe food.

But an alarming number of products sold as allergen-free actually contain harmful amounts, the Tribune found.

Many of the problems occur with foods marketed to children: candy, cookies, cakes and ice cream.

Iconic childhood favorites such as Oreos, Pop-Tarts,

Frosted Flakes, Jello-O and Campbell's SpaghettiOs have been recalled for containing allergens in recent years.

An estimated 30,000 Americans require emergency-room treatment and 150 die each year from allergic reactions to food. A large percentage were children, researchers say.

To determine the full scope of the problem, the Tribune created a computer database of 2,800 recalls related to food allergies over the last 10 years. The newspaper found that roughly five products a week are recalled because of allergens, making it one of the top reasons any consumer product in America is recalled.

But that doesn't mean the government or companies are vigilant.

Take the example of Peggy Pridemore, a Kentucky woman who bought Wellshire Kids' Dinosaur Shapes Chicken Bites because her son Patrick has a severe wheat allergy. Bold letters on the packaging said the item was gluten-free, or contained no wheat, rye and barley proteins.

After Patrick, then 3, ate the nuggets in December, he started coughing, his eyes swelled and he had trouble breathing. His mom jabbed his leg with a large needle containing epinephrine, a drug to help him breathe, then raced him to the hospital, where he recovered in the emergency room.

Pridemore said she contacted both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the food manufacturer and that neither offered to test the chicken nuggets.

The Tribune recently bought the product on two occasions at a River Forest, Ill., supermarket and sent the samples to one of the nation's leading food-allergy labs, at the University of Nebraska. Both times, the lab found gluten. The item remains on shelves across the U.S.

"I'm stunned it hasn't been recalled," Pridemore said. "I thought somebody somewhere would do something."

The nation has seen a rise since the 1990s in the number of children with food allergies, now estimated to be 3 million kids, or 1 in every 25 children.

As awareness has skyrocketed so have recalls. But they are voluntary. Food companies themselves, not regulators, decide whether to do so. If they do, the companies work with regulators to coordinate the recalls and issue news releases to inform the public.

Yet the official recall statements by the Food and Drug Administration often downplay the true risks or lack basic information, such as where the tainted products were sold. One reason for the soft pedaling: The FDA allows the food companies to write their own recalls.

A recent recall statement, for instance, read more like an advertisement than a warning. "While the product is good and wholesome," it stated, "these soups may contain wheat or soy as ingredients not identified on the label."

In many cases, the government and companies never inform consumers of recalls. The Tribune found that nearly half of the allergy-related recalls in the last 10 years were not announced to the public. This was true even in dozens of cases where the FDA classified products as likely to cause serious harm or death.

Alarms sounded by consumers seldom result in products being pulled.

The Tribune examined 260 complaints to the FDA since 2001 where people with known food allergies, many of them children who had to be treated at hospitals, reported a reaction from products they claimed were mislabeled. Seven percent of those claims resulted in recalls.

When authorities concluded a product was at fault, the regulatory wheels moved slowly. On average, it took 32 days to issue a recall. In one case, a girl, 14, with a known milk allergy was taken to the emergency room after eating muffins made from Duncan Hines chocolate chip mix. The illness was reported to the FDA, but the distributor, Pinnacle Foods, did not recall the mix until seven months later.

When asked by the Tribune why the recall took so long, Pinnacle said it immediately had the product tested but found no milk. A few months later, the company received a second complaint of an allergic reaction to the mix. Pinnacle said it investigated, this time finding a likely culprit overlooked before: a batch of chocolate chips.

Many manufacturers test their products for allergens and have set up special assembly lines to prevent cross-contamination. But other companies, particularly small ones with limited resources, acknowledge taking limited precautions.

Others do little or no testing, and the government does not require them to do so.

The FDA, which oversees the vast majority of packaged foods, said it trusts firms to police themselves.

The USDA, which regulates meat, poultry and egg products, is even more lax. It said it never tests for undeclared allergens, such as eggs or peanuts, because these ingredients by themselves are not prohibited foods, ignoring the fact that products containing allergens are potentially illegal and deadly.

The Tribune recently bought two samples of the chicken nuggets and sent them to the same Nebraska lab. Both tested positive for gluten, including a sample from an unopened box.

The nuggets, said Steve Taylor, the lab's director and a leading allergy expert, "are not safe for people with wheat allergies or celiac disease," often characterized by chronic abdominal pain.

The newspaper also tested two other Wellshire Kids' products: the "Gluten Free" Chicken Corn Dogs and the "Gluten Free" Beef Corn Dogs, finding high amounts of gluten in both.

Wellshire Farms owner Louis Colameco said his products are safe.

But he said that in light of the two consumer complaints and recent moves by regulators to tighten gluten-free rules, he halted production of the three Wellshire Kids' products in June.

Colameco said he would start making the food again when he finds a supplier who can guarantee that the batter used in the products is gluten-free. The old supplier, he said, could not give such an assurance.

He said he has not recalled the Wellshire Kids products still on store shelves because he believes they are in compliance with federal regulations.

But weak and murky federal rules on gluten leave food companies wiggle room and consumers at risk.

The USDA, which has jurisdiction over meat-based products such as chicken nuggets, said it has no policy specifically addressing gluten-free claims. The agency must approve labels before products go to market, and packaging claims are reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

The FDA's rules are tougher. Though the agency has no specific rule for gluten-free products, the agency's policy generally is that absent a standard, products claiming to be "free" of an ingredient cannot contain it.

Why the allergy spike?

The number of kids with food allergies is mysteriously soaring — peanut allergies alone have doubled in recent years — but scientists do not agree on the cause.

One theory is simply more awareness. Parents today may be quicker to seek a medical diagnosis for their children's illness than in the past.

Another explanation is the "hygiene hypothesis," which argues that some children's environments have become too sterile. With fewer germs to fend off, a child's immune system overreacts to common food proteins. Other theories abound. Kids eat more prepackaged foods and a wider variety of dishes containing potential allergens. Or an increase in births by Caesarean section has robbed babies of the protective power of microbes present in the mother's vagina. But few studies confirm such speculation.

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