Chilling New FDA Revelations
by Spence Cooper on 05/11/09 at 11:30 am
FDA: Working Hard For You or Hardly Working at All?
In a year plagued with salmonella outbreaks that sickened hundreds of Americans and resulted in several tragic deaths, a year in which thousands of food products in scores of categories were recalled by hundreds of companies, The Food and Drug Administration has announced its failure to meet its own paltry goals for auditing individual states’ food safety inspections.
In order to guarantee accepted guidelines and ensure state compliance with inspection requirements, the FDA formulated plans to audit food safety inspections conducted by various states within the union on its behalf. But the FDA did not meet its goal of auditing seven percent in seventeen of thirty-nine states it paid and authorized to conduct inspections between the 2007-08.
No FDA audits of any kind were conducted in Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska, and Wyoming. This audit shortfall occurs in the aftermath of the salmonella outbreak linked to peanut products from the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Georgia, where the state of Georgia itself inspected the plant, and either totally failed in their duty or whitewashed their report which disclosed only minor health infractions. The FDA’s subsequent inspection of the same plant revealed four strains of salmonella, mold, and cockroaches, as well as a defective peanut roaster. The combined state and federal fiasco killed eight and sickened hundreds.
Despite the FDA’s mortifying disclosure of incompetent oversight of states whose own agencies are understaffed and ill equipped, Richard Barnes, FDA director of federal-state relations state agencies says, “Eventually the FDA intends to have states audit themselves while it [FDA] checks their overall inspection programs. That will conserve FDA resources and increase its influence,”
States audit themselves? – Like in Georgia? It’s the FDA’s responsibility to audit state agencies. It’s bad enough that our country’s food suppliers are allowed to hire private companies to inspect the operations of the very same companies that hired them.
And get this, the FDA considers its performance this year a success since by comparison, in the 2006-07 audit year, its goal was not achieved in 21 of 37 states with no audits conducted at all in eight states. In 1998, the FDA did no audits in 21 of 38 states, said the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General in a 2000 report.
Obama’s new head of the FDA, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, has sworn to prioritize protecting the country’s food supply by restoring public confidence in the Food and Drug Administration. I fear Dr. Hamburg will have her hands full dealing with the swine flu vaccine alone. Oh, by the way, Dr. Hamburg also supports the FDA regulation of tobacco. In case you haven’t heard, the FDA now wants to regulate a product they believe is hazardous to human health. How about just competently regulating the nation’s food supply.
Anyone with a pulse should know by now the FDA is incapable of effectively regulating anything — all the more reason to either grow or buy local organic food. There is no way the FDA can safely monitor a complex global food production supply chain where much of our food travels 12,000 miles before it gets to our supermarkets – they can‘t even account for peanuts in Blakely, Georgia.
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