NC Healthcare Coverage Blog

The protection of our food supply by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently shown to be extremely inadequate, with deadly consequences. Recently, more than 500 people in the U.S. have become sick and at least 8 have passed away from a salmonella outburst that was traced to peanut products.

A extensive analysis of the FDA was ordered on Monday, February 2, President Obama. He said that Americans should be able to trust the government to keep children safe as they eat peanut butter. His own daughter, Sasha, eats it for lunch. It is a shame that it takes a president with a young child at risk for the FDA to begin stringent standards for protecting our food supply.

Jean Halloran, director of Food Policy Initiatives for Consumers Union, says that consumers should be extremely angry. She says “The FDA is supposed to be a watchdog for consumers, and for too long, this agency has been coming up short.”

A Georgia processing plant is to blame for the recent outbreak. A criminal probe has begun because the FDA claims that the company knowingly shipped salmonella contaminated peanut butter out for almost a year. The company often retested the harmful products at a different lab just to get a negative reading.

What’s even more upsetting is that federal inspectors had not been to the Georgia plant since 2001. Also, when Canada held and refused a shipment that had metal fragments in it, the FDA  asked Georgia state inspectors to look at the plant, instead of its own inspectors. No samples were taken for inspection during the two visits. The FDA had to resort to bio-terrorism laws in order to acquire testing records from the company.

Unfortunately, these food safety issues are not unfamiliar to the public. Just last year, there was a jalapeno salmonella outbreak and in 2007, there was a lettuce problem. All this should put the spotlight on a problem that the Obama administration must conquer, which is an inadequate amount of FDA inspectors. There are less than 2000 in the agency. According to one expert, the scarcity of inspectors can often cause food producers to  go an astounding 15 to 20 years between inspections.

Jean Halloran claims that Congress should give power to the agency to order food recalls, to require annual inspections of food processing plants and demand that processors report tests that find infected products. A bill was introduced during the first week of February by a lawmaker that will reorganize federal food safety enforcement and require it to be more responsible. There are four main bills to revise the food safety system currently being constructed.