The Ball Park Franks Fiasco

Let us now have a moment of silence for the victims of the Ball Park Franks fiasco.

Thank you.

This is the situation: Bil Mar Foods is a unit of the Chicago-based giant Sara Lee Corporation, the maker of pound cakes, cheesecakes, pies, muffins, L'Eggs, Hanes, Playtex and Wonderbra products -- your typical food and underwear conglomerate.

Bil Mar makes hot dogs -- Ball Park franks hot dogs. You've seen them when you go to a baseball game at Tiger Stadium in Detroit and elsewhere.

Last month, Sara Lee pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts in connection with a listeriosis outbreak that led to the deaths of at least 21 consumers who ate Ball Park Franks hot dogs and other meat products. One hundred people were seriously injured. The company paid a $200,000 fine.

According to Kenneth Moll, a Chicago attorney representing the families of the victims, this is what happened:

Bil Mar has a hot dog facility in Zeeland, Michigan. The company shut down the facility over the July 4th weekend of 1998 to replace a refrigeration unit that was above the hot processing facility. The hot dogs are heated at one end and sent down a conveyer belt to the other.

Moll's theory is that the removal of the air conditioning unit and its replacement dislodged some dangerous bacteria in the ceiling. When the plant reopened, steam from the passing hot dogs went up to the ceiling, condensed and dripped back down with the dangerous bacteria onto the hot dogs.

In November 1998, Paul Mead from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta started receiving calls from the state health departments around the country that had isolated strains of a deadly bacteria, Listeria monocytogenes.

Mead looked at the bacteria and found that they were the same strain. He sent out questionnaires and discovered there was an open package of hot dogs in the home of one of the people who died. The CDC tested the hot dogs and isolated the same bacterial strain -- a DNA fingerprint of the type of bacteria.

According to Moll, Mead went to the Bil Mar plant in Zeeland, Michigan and tested unopened packages of hot dogs and was able to isolate the same DNA fingerprint bacteria. In December 1998, Sara Lee ordered a recall of millions of pounds of hot dogs and deli meats.

According to a series of reports in the Detroit Free Press, plant workers were regularly testing work surfaces for the presence of cold-loving bacteria -- a class of bacteria that includes the deadly Listeria monocytogenes as well as some harmless bacteria.

According to the Free Press, beginning in July 1998, after the replacement of the old refrigeration unit, workers recorded a sharp increase in the presence of cold-loving bacteria. The number of positive samples remained high until the company stopped performing tests in November 1998 -- a month before the Sara Lee recall.

"Sara Lee was doing testing of the environment in the plant for cold-loving bacteria," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Then their tests started coming up positive, so they stopped testing. They knew they had a problem with bacteria in the plant. But instead of solving it, they chose to ignore it."

This is crucial, because if the company knew that they were had a Listeria monocytogenes problem and ignored it, they could be hit with a felony conviction. And felony convictions have all kinds of collateral consequences, including possible loss of federal contracts -- Sara Lee had a big hot dog contract with the Department of Defense.

In an interview, U.S. Attorney Phillip Green said there was insufficient evidence to bring a felony charge.

"There was simply no evidence that Sara Lee Bil Mar knew that the food product that they were producing and shipping out was adulterated with Listeria monocytogenes," Green told us.