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FDA Heralds Progress in Food Safety

By Pritzker | Ruohonen

The government agency in charge of safekeeping more than 50 percent of America's food supply issued a statement Monday touting progress on several fronts.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is no stranger to criticism about its inspection of food plants and its prevention of foodborne illnesses. But it said several new initiatives have been launched since the unveiling last year of a new Food Protection Plan. The FDA said it has:

• Approved the use of irradiation of iceberg lettuce and spinach for the control of pathogens such as E coli O157:H7.
• Started using genetic analysis to identify hundreds of Salmonella strains from seafood imports. The analysis provides information to trace outbreaks of Salmonella.
• Developed a rapid detection method that uses flow cytometry to identify E. coli and Salmonella in food, now in use in poultry processing facilities to detect and prevent bacterial contamination during food processing.
• Signed cooperative agreements with six U.S. states to form a Rapid Response Team to develop an all-hazards response capability for tainted food.
• Decided to establish offices in China, India, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East to regulate exports to the United States of food and other FDA-regulated products.

Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner of foods for the FDA, also told the New York Times that FDA is hiring 130 employees to conduct inspections and collect samples.

A common criticism of the agency is that it annually inspects only a small percentage of the 65,520 domestic food production facilities in the U.S. that fall under FDA authority. The U.S. Department of Agriculture inspects meats, poultry and processed egg products while the FDA covers seafood, produce, egg and dairy foods.

According to a recent report by Center for Science in the Public Interest, foods regulated by the FDA have been associated with more than two times as many foodborne illness outbreaks as foods regulated by USDA. The nutrition watchdog group favors a plan -- which has already been discussed by some members in Congress -- to separate food safety from drug and medical device approvals and create a new Food Safety Administration at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jeffrey Levi, an associate professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, told U.S. News and World Report that the new FDA report fails to offer enough guidance for what needs to be done to protect the U.S. food supply.

You can read the FDA report in its entirety by clicking here.

Full post as published by Food Poisoning Law Blog on December 01, 2008 (boomark / email).