New Report – An Indictment of the F.D.A.
by Spence Cooper on 13/04/09 at 11:40 am
Salmonella
According to C.D.C. estimates, around 76 million people in the U.S. suffer foodborne illnesses each year, 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die. The FDA’s negligence and incompetence in its role of supervising America’s food supply has been in question for years. Criticism of the agency comes not only from tax paying citizens, and organized advocacy groups, but from Congress as well.
But it’s not just bureaucratic bungling, the FDA is grossly underfunded. “Between 2003 and 2007, the FDA’s main food-safety arm lost 20 percent of its science staff and 600 inspectors. The United States gets 15 percent of its food from foreign countries, including 60 percent of its fresh fruits and vegetables and 75 percent of its seafood, but just 1 percent of all imported food is inspected.”
Dr. Acheson, director of food safety and security at the (FDA), said the agency was “embarking on an aggressive and proactive approach aimed at protecting and enforcing the safety of the country’s food supply. He said the FDA has expanded its presence overseas and now has offices in China, Latin America, Europe and India, and has hired more than 150 additional inspectors and more than 30 additional scientists and consumer safety officers in the past year to help ensure food safety in the United States.”
Who is Acheson kidding! The FDA would need more than 150 additional inspectors to monitor what we import from China alone! China supplies the US with a significant amount of seafood, canned vegetables, fruit juices, honey, and processed foods. But China has far less stringent standards for pesticide residue, and bans fewer pesticides than the United States. China has hundreds of millions of small farms owned and operated by families and small business owners. China’s food processing facilities are structured in much the same ragtag way. Instead of having a few giant food processing and manufacturing companies, China has hundreds of thousands of warehouses and small-scale food factories with ten or fewer employees; much of the food is produced illegally and in unlicensed workshops without basic sanitary conditions. Expiration dates of perishable food is deliberately altered, then mixed with fresh and outdated products. See China’s Food Policies: A Nightmare on Elm Street.
“F.D.A. needs to do more inspections,” said Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration. That’s more than an understatement. Acheson also claims the “system needs to be modernized to address the challenges and changes of the globalization of the food supply and rapid distribution chains.”
David Mackay, head of the Kellogg Company agrees. “What is needed … is creation of a beefed-up and consolidated food safety unit, either within the FDA or in its own agency, that would have the staff, scientific expertise, and mandate to bring food regulation into the 21st century.”
So a new study from the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network known as FoodNet, indicting the FDA’s poor performance comes as no surprise. FoodNet’s report evaluated the occurrence of infections caused by eight bacteria and three parasites found in food in ten states.
“Overall,” writes Madeline Ellis with HealthNews, “the report found 18,499 laboratory-confirmed cases of food poisoning in 2008 among the 10 states involved, which represent an estimated 15 percent of the U.S. population. Infection rates for five food-borne illnesses exceeded national goals set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the case of salmonella, the national goal in 2008 was seven illnesses for every 100,000 people, but the actual number was 16—more than twice the goal—and did not include the outbreak of salmonella illness linked to peanut products that began in late 2008 and has caused at least 690 confirmed illnesses in 46 states, and may have contributed to nine deaths. Campylobacter and shigella were the second and third most common food-borne illnesses, occurring at rates of about 13 and 7 per 100,000, respectively.”
And since FoodNet’s study only includes people who have contacted a doctor who took stool samples and then ordered a lab test, the real number of food-borne illnesses is far higher.
“This is confirming what a lot of folks have been worried about, which is some of the progress that had been made a few years ago on foodborne illness is now being reversed and we’re seeing increased rates again.” said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch.
Nancy Donley, whose 6-year-old son died after eating contaminated hamburger in 1993, is now president of (STOP), an acronym for Safe Tables Our Priority. “It is clear,” said Nancy, “that current food safety regulatory programs are not effective in reducing the toll of foodborne illness,” she said. “We need the setting of strict microbial standards and improved government oversight and inspection of our food supply to ensure that other lives are not cut short and other families will not have to suffer as mine has.”
“This year’s report confirms a very important concern, especially with two high-profile Salmonella outbreaks in the last year,” said Robert Tauxe, deputy director of CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases. “It reflects the complexity of the problem with many different foods becoming potentially contaminated, including more fresh produce. It reflects the fact that pathogens like E. coli 0157 and salmonella can spread in the environment and contaminate a number of different foods, some of which we have not seen in the past. And the food industry is also complicated and changing with a variety of different arenas and components from all over the world.”
Even the Department of Agriculture has no faith in the FDA’s abilities. “The report is likely to deepen tensions between the F.D.A. and the Department of Agriculture, which have long been rivals in overseeing food safety,” according to The New York Times. “An Agriculture Department campaign begun in 2006 to reduce salmonella contamination of meat and poultry has been successful…But Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the C.D.C.’s division of foodborne diseases, suggested that whatever progress the department had made in improving overall food safety might have been lost by the F.D.A.
We could all continue to lay blame solely on the FDA, but what about our lawmakers? It’s easy for Congress and oversight committees to put an underfunded government agency on the hot seat. Why haven’t lawmakers legislated for more FDA inspector funding? Could it be because they’re too busy bailing out zombie banks, credit card and insurance companies? Yeah, I’ve read all about Obama’s plan to revamp the agency with a Food Safety Group to advise him on how food safety laws can be upgraded and improved; but the FDA doesn’t need more groups and heads of groups and laws, and boards and bureaucracy, the FDA needs more inspectors, honest inspectors – not former Monsanto employees.
Related articles
- U.S. Food Safety No Longer Improving, Data Show (nytimes.com)
- FDA to Consumers: Stop Eating Products Containing Peanut Butter (shoppingblog.com)
