American schools are experiencing increasing numbers of food-borne illness outbreaks, but complex federal laws and bureaucratic turf battles hamper the government system designed to protect children from harm, a congressional watchdog agency reported Tuesday. 

Responding to the issue, Bush administration officials announced reforms in the school lunch program, saying they were implementing new rules to give schools more information about the safety of factories that provide student meals. The focus on school food safety came at a joint Senate-House hearing that examined how lapses in federal oversight allowed contaminated meals to reach students. The hearing was held in response to a Tribune investigation last year that found unsafe practices in the factories that make school meals and in the kitchens and cafeterias where they are served, congressional leaders said. 

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said that the number of school-related outbreaks reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doubled over the last decade, and generally increased an average of 10 percent per year. 

Lawrence Dyckman, an official with the General Accounting Office, said the CDC recorded 292 instances of food poisoning between 1990 and 1999, affecting approximately 16,000 children. 

"Our analysis clearly shows an increasing trend," Dyckman testified. 

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and other lawmakers questioned administration food safety officials at the hearing, and took the unusual step of requesting that they remain in the room during testimony from families whose children had been sickened by school meals. 

"Victims are too often treated like second-class citizens by health officials whose main interest is covering up for any misdeeds," said Cheryl Roberts of Comer, Ga. Seated in the audience was her 15-year-old son, Tyler, who in 1998 suffered kidney failure after eating an undercooked school lunch burger that was contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. 

The government has put price above safety in purchasing foods, and that has "resulted in school lunches becoming a dumping ground for ground beef and other agricultural products of questionable safety," Roberts said. 

More and more school districts--especially in poor areas--are turning to private contractors to plan menus, order food and oversee kitchens and cafeterias. But the contractors often do not disclose where they are getting their food and rarely provide inspection reports on their suppliers. 

When the school lunch suppliers deliver contaminated meals, the federal government's recall system offers a flimsy safeguard for children. 

Shipping records blocked 

Industry-backed confidentiality rules block state and county authorities from getting company shipping records so they can trace the food and protect children from further harm. And the three federal agencies involved in school food illness outbreaks--the Agriculture Department, the Food and Drug Administration, and the CDC--do not share critical information with each other. 

Elsa Murano, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for food safety, testified that her agency is putting in place new rules that will allow it to share food company records--tracing where the ingredients came from and who the distributors were--with other agencies and with state and local officials who buy food for schools. 

"This will go a long way" toward improving the response to outbreaks, Murano said. 

Agriculture Department officials also said they are working on ways of giving schools more information about seizures and recalls of contaminated food. 

About 17 percent of school meals are donated to schools by the department through a $5.7 billion program that buys surplus food to help stabilize farm markets. Department officials routinely use federal inspection and compliance records when they make purchasing decisions. 

But local school authorities, who buy the remainder of the school food on the commercial market, usually cannot get access to this safety information about the manufacturers from whom they buy. 

Inspection database urged 

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) called for establishing a national food inspection database that would be available to school districts. 

"One of the key ingredients in making school lunches safer is to provide local school districts better information with which to make decisions. This can be done today," she said. 

Schools "often buy unknowingly from firms with a long history of safety violations," Schakowsky said. "The federal government should be providing not just money and goods to local school systems, but the information they need to protect our children." 

Agriculture Department officials said they would study the issue further and review any existing legal impediments to sharing information on food companies. 

"Schools must be given the tools they need to make sure food is safe," Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said. 

Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest testified that federal food safety agencies need authority to order recalls and trace food. 

But John Bode, an attorney for the National Food Processors Association, an industry group, said, "There is absolutely no evidence that a change in organizational structure would result in safer food." Bode said the government should permit irradiation of the school food it buys--a technique many food safety advocates oppose because it has not been extensively studied. 

Durbin said breakdowns in the federal school food safety program underscore the need for a single food safety agency with legislative authority to order recalls. 

"The existing food safety system is in a bureaucratic tangle," Durbin said.