Who Killed the MDP? The Cheap Program That Found Listeria Before Anyone Got Sick, and How We Bring It Back

For eleven years, this country had one program that went out into the marketplace, picked up fresh produce and tested it for the bugs that put people in the hospital.

It was called the Microbiological Data Program. It cost about $4.5 million a year. It did about 80 percent of federal pathogen testing of fresh produce.

On December 31, 2012, we turned it off.

I have complained about that ever since. Here is the history, who killed it, why we need it more now than we did then, and the ways we can bring it back.

Born bipartisan

The MDP had parents in both parties. It grew out of President Clinton’s 1997 Food Safety Initiative. In fiscal 1999, USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service ran a $100,000 pilot, testing 96 samples of lettuce and tomatoes in New York and Ohio.

A Republican Congress funded the real thing in the 2001 agriculture appropriations bill, about $6.2 million. Sampling began in April 2001, three months into George W. Bush’s first term, and his administration ran the program for eight years.

AMS built it smart. It copied the design of its Pesticide Data Program. Statisticians from the National Agricultural Statistics Service drew up the sampling plans. Samples were pulled at terminal markets and distribution centers, weighted by population and volume, so the results meant something nationally. State agriculture labs did the testing, ten states at the start and eleven later, covering about half the country.

By the end it was testing 10,000 to 15,000 samples a year, more than 111,000 from 2002 through 2012 alone. Cilantro, parsley, spinach, lettuce, sprouts, hot peppers, tomatoes, cantaloupe and green onions. Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli O157:H7 and the other Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. About a quarter of the samples were imported.

They wanted it blind

The produce industry hated it from day one.

At the program’s first public meeting, in January 2002, the Food Marketing Institute, United Fresh, Western Growers, the International Fresh-cut Produce Association, the California Strawberry Commission, U.S. Apple and the California melon boards lined up to object. They said it duplicated FDA. They said reporting generic E. coli would “scare consumers away from purchasing produce.” They said states would use the data for enforcement.

They won the big one. In its written responses, AMS said “congressional language” required a “blind survey.” So it stripped grower, packer and distributor names off its sample forms.

Read that again. Taxpayers paid to test food, and the testers were told not to write down whose food it was.

AMS even conceded that by the time a sample was confirmed positive, “the product would no longer be in the marketplace.” And at FDA’s request, Listeria and E. coli O157:H7 were left out at the start.

The program got better anyway. By 2008, positives were going to FDA and the states, and product was getting pulled. But the public never learned whose produce tested positive.

What it found

From 2009 to 2012, the MDP found Salmonella 111 times, E. coli O157:H7 twice, other Shiga toxin-producing E. coli 82 times and Listeria 12 times. Those findings led to 38 recalls. Forty-four of its Salmonella isolates, both O157:H7 isolates and nine of the twelve Listeria isolates matched sick people.

On July 16, 2012, a New York Department of Agriculture inspector pulled a Burch Farms cantaloupe for MDP testing. Listeria. The positive went to FDA on July 26, the company recalled on July 28, and the recall grew to about 188,000 melons. No illnesses were reported. That was eleven months after Listeria in Jensen Farms cantaloupe sickened 147 people and killed 33. My firm represented 46 of those families. Their medical bills topped $15 million.

That spring, MDP testing triggered a spinach recall. That September, a single MDP sample led to a Salmonellarecall of California cantaloupes.

MDP testing found a Salmonella strain in California sprouts in 2008 that matched the strain behind a 2011 California sprout recall. It had apparently survived in the seed for three years.

FDA and USDA scientists studied 132 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli strains from produce, 105 of them from the MDP. About 9 percent carried the eae gene linked to severe illness, including O157:H7 and O26:H11. Spinach carried STEC in about 1 in 200 samples, even after the reforms that followed the 2006 spinach outbreak. A Michigan cilantro isolate was more than 95 percent similar to the strain from a Michigan patient with bloody diarrhea.

In 2016, those same scientists wrote that low prevalence still matters, because produce is grown in volume, shipped widely and eaten raw, and that monitoring must continue. It never did.

Who killed it, and why

David Acheson, FDA’s former top food safety official, summed up the fight in 2012: “the industry hates it and consumer organizations love it.”

The industry. It was not subtle. United Fresh’s Food Safety & Technology Council put it in writing in January 2011: “We do not believe this program is adding to public safety.”

David Gombas, United Fresh’s senior vice president for food safety and technology, told the Chicago Tribunethat over time the MDP “got twisted and it turned into a regulatory program.” What he meant was that it found contamination, sent it to FDA, and caused recalls. In other words, it worked.

Gombas told Food Safety News that by the time the MDP found something, “That produce is gone.” He told the Associated Press that “none of the product recalled has ever been traced to an outbreak.” The program’s own record tells a different story. Of the 23 recalls MDP testing triggered in 2010 and 2011, 15 involved human illnesses.

United Fresh’s 2012 lobbying agenda called for finishing the MDP off, and its lobbying firm reported working on MDP funding in the agriculture spending bill (see Eat Drink Politics). The industry’s line was that the MDP cost growers millions in recalls, unfairly targeted farmers, and belonged at FDA (see David Acheson’s summary).

Then, that same year, United Fresh announced it would build its own industry testing database, blinded to protect the identity of data sources.

The Obama administration. Its fiscal 2013 budget called the MDP a low-impact, lower-priority program outside AMS’s core marketing mission (Food Safety News). When Rep. Rosa DeLauro grilled Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at a February 2012 hearing, he defended the cut on the same grounds. Even when USDA gave the program a reprieve through December, a spokesman said it “does not align with USDA’s core mission.”

Congress. DeLauro fought nearly alone. After the Burch Farms recall, she said it “reinforces MDP’s value.”Neither the House nor the Senate spending bill funded it.

FDA. It did not ask for the program and said it lacked the resources to take it on while implementing FSMA. Vilsack said he would like to see FDA get the money to absorb it. It never did.

But the real cause of death is simpler: the MDP never had its own statute. AMS ran it under its general authority in the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 and a yearly appropriation. When the money stopped, the program stopped.

Compare the Pesticide Data Program. Same agency. Same design. It is still running, because section 301 of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 tells USDA to do it. Pesticides got a law. Pathogens got a line item.

Why we need it now

The lights went out fast. Within weeks of the shutdown, people began falling ill with Salmonella Saintpaul from cucumbers imported from Mexico, at least 73 of them. The MDP never tested cucumbers. That is the lesson, not an excuse. In 2015, imported cucumbers sickened 907 people and killed six. A testing program has to follow the outbreaks.

Then came 2026. The Cyclospora outbreak tied to Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce sickened more than 12,000 people and killed two, in a summer when CDC counted 19,595 confirmed Cyclospora cases. Congress sent fifteen letters and has no published answers. There is no kill step for Cyclospora.

Without product testing, every outbreak becomes an argument. FDA tied this one to Taylor Farms lettuce, retracted the one positive product test it had announced, and the company has told the public that FDA never found the parasite in its product. The argument goes on. Data would end it.

What does FDA do instead? Episodic sampling assignments. Its first large survey of fresh basil, cilantro and parsley ran from 2017 to 2021, slowed by the pandemic, and tested 1,383 samples. The results came out in 2024. The MDP tested more produce than that every six weeks.

Growers need this too. In 2008, FDA warned consumers off tomatoes during the Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak. The real source was jalapeño and serrano peppers from Mexico. House Agriculture Committee Republicans put the tomato industry’s loss at about $100 million. Growers sued the government to get it back and lost. Years of baseline data on which commodities carry which bugs helps investigators rule products out as well as in.

And the tools are better now. In 2012, labs compared strains with pulsed-field gel electrophoresis. Today whole-genome sequencing ties a produce isolate to sick people with far more precision, and FDA’s new traceability rule will put lot codes on much of this produce. A positive sample today points somewhere.

I am not the only one saying it. In September, Dr. Donna Garren, FDA’s new director of the Office of Produce Safety, told state agriculture officials that FDA should bring back a national approach to produce testing like the MDP (Lancaster Farming). On transparency, she put it this way: “When bad actors know they will be named … behavior changes.”

Garren knows the industry side of this fight. She spent six years as United Fresh’s vice president for scientific and technical affairs, including the years when United Fresh first objected to the MDP (see her bio).

As I keep saying, food safety is not expensive. Outbreaks are.

How we bring it back

There is more than one road.

1. USDA restarts it now. No new law is needed. The MDP ran under authority the Department still has, and the Pesticide Data Program still has the sites, the state agreements and the people. I have drafted a petition to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asking USDA to restart the program in fiscal 2027 and put full funding in the fiscal 2028 budget.

2. Appropriations. A line item and report language in the agriculture spending bill. Rep. Andy Harris, a physician from Maryland, one of the original MDP states, chairs the House subcommittee. Its top Democrat, Rep. Sanford Bishop, signed one of this year’s Cyclospora letters.

3. A statute. I have a draft Produce Pathogen Surveillance Act. It provides permanent authorization on the PDP model and at least 15,000 samples a year. It requires whole-genome sequencing of every isolate, testing for Cyclospora and viruses, a commodity list that follows the outbreaks, and surge testing when CDC or FDA asks. And it ends blind sampling: firms behind confirmed positives get named.

4. The farm bill. The same language could ride on the next one.

5. States go first. A state like Washington, an original MDP state, could fund its agriculture lab to run an MDP-style program and show Congress how it is done.

What are not real alternatives? FDA’s one-off assignments, which take years. Genome networks like GenomeTrakr, which sequence what someone else finds; somebody still has to test the food. And industry’s private testing, which the public never sees. Prevention matters, but testing is how you know prevention is working.

Make produce safe again

The MDP was conceived under a Democrat, funded by Republicans, run for eight years by a Republican administration and killed under a Democrat. Protecting people from E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and Cyclospora is not a partisan project. I said it two years ago and I will keep saying it.

For a rounding error in the federal budget, we can put the trip wire back in the produce supply.

And this time, let’s write down the names.

Sources

USDA AMS, Microbiological Data Program

USDA AMS, Microbiological Data Program; Public Meeting, 67 Fed. Reg. 65777 (Oct. 28, 2002)

Reddy, Wang, Adams & Feng, Prevalence and Characteristics of Salmonella Serotypes Isolated from Fresh Produce Marketed in the United States, J. Food Prot. (2016)

Feng & Reddy, Prevalences of Shiga Toxin Subtypes … in Shiga-Toxigenic E. coli Strains Isolated from Fresh Produce, Appl. Environ. Microbiol. (2013)

Monday et al., Produce Isolates of the E. coli Ont:H52 Serotype, Appl. Environ. Microbiol. (2006)

Food Safety News, The Fight Over the Microbiological Data Program (Feb. 2012)

Food Safety News, Tainted Spinach Detected by Program Budget Cuts Will Ax (May 2012)

Food Safety News, USDA Budget Cut Could Slash 80 Percent of Produce Testing (2012)

David Acheson, Should the Microbiological Data Program Be Saved?, Food Safety News (July 2012)