The New York Times

When Representative Rosa L. DeLauro was 2 years old, she was stricken with salmonella poisoning, taken from her frightened parents and quarantined for two weeks in a hospital. Though she remembers little of the experience herself, her parents talked about their fears for years afterward.

Now Ms. DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, is on a campaign to clean up the nation's dirty food. For the sixth year in a row, she stood today with her fellow lawmakers and announced that she was co-sponsoring the Safe Food Act designed to strengthen food safety rules and streamline their enforcement. "We face a food safety crisis," she said at a news conference, pointing to the record recall last year of 66 million pounds of meat that were potentially contaminated, nearly double the amount recalled in 2001.

"Even when the Agriculture Department knows a slaughterhouse is producing dirty meat it does not have the authority to close it down," she added. "That is unacceptable."

Today was the 10th anniversary of the deaths of four children from contaminated hamburgers sold at a Jack-in-the-Box in Seattle, and Ms. DeLauro was joined by mothers whose children had died or become seriously ill after eating contaminated meat over the past decade.

The mothers are part of a group called Safe Tables Our Priority, or STOP, which released a report today describing how 5,000 people die every year from preventable food-borne diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report outlined the measures the group would like enacted by Congress to ensure that no other children were killed by bad food.

Unmentioned was Ms. DeLauro's own serious illness, more than a half century ago.

"It was a long time ago when the only treatment was isolation," Ms. DeLauro, 59, said.

Her father was an Italian immigrant, her mother an Italian-American whose family owned a pastry shop. They were bereft that their only child was locked away in a New Haven hospital, where they went every day and sat on the hospital steps, waiting to know whether their daughter would survive.

"It was traumatic for them, Italians, to think that something they had fed me had nearly killed me," Ms. DeLauro said.

She heard stories of her illness throughout her childhood, and was told of her anger when she was finally released, her sense of abandonment and her parents' guilt.

By the time she arrived in Congress in 1991, Ms. DeLauro said she had put the "family legend" out of her mind. But a committee assignment brought her into contact with food safety issues and soon with Anna Teardo, a Connecticut woman whose daughter became blind in one eye from meat contaminated by feces.

"That's when I remembered what my parents went through, and I realized I was now a part of an institution that has the ability to do something about this," she said in an interview in her Capitol Hill office.

Only one Republican, Tom Latham of Iowa, has signed on as a co-sponsor of her bill, which would create a single food agency to replace the 19 departments and agencies that have some responsibility for insuring that food is safe.

But with the record recalls of contaminated meat and a concern that terrorists could infect the food supply, Ms. DeLauro said she had new reasons to believe that meat safety rules would be strengthened.

Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, raised that issue at the news conference.

"If a terrorist had been responsible for killing those 5,000 people last year, don't you think we would be mobilized?" Ms. Schakowsky asked. "When it comes to food safety, we are on orange alert, too."

Elsa Murano, undersecretary for food safety at the Agriculture Department, said she welcomed the work of STOP, but also defended the administration's record on food safety.

"Breaking the cycle of food-borne illness and improving human health is an important goal of the U.S. Department of Agriculture," she said. "The Bush administration has a strong record in its food safety efforts."

The administration has asked for a $117 million increase for food safety programs in its budget for fiscal 2004, but Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said at the news conference that the money would only be available if Congress agreed to levy user fees on the industry itself.

"It will never pass," he predicted.

The American Meat Institute, a trade industry group, released a statement applauding STOP but disagreed with its approach to food safety improvements.

Rather than change the rules about the level of pathogens tolerable in meat, Janet Riley, the institute's vice president, said her group would prefer "using the best science and technology available" for irradiation of meat.