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Former FDA Executive Says It's Time For A Change

By PritzkerLaw

A former deputy commissioner for policy at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is among those who support the idea of stripping food safety responsibility from the agency and creating a new Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services.

Michael R. Taylor, who is now research professor of health policy at the School of Public Health at George Washington University, said in a press release Wednesday that a unified and elevated management structure for food safety is needed to implement a science- and risk-based program dedicated to preventing foodborne illness.

Taylor's credentials include a stint as administrator of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

His position was announced in conjunction with the release of a new report on food safety regulation by Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The report emphasized FDA's shortcomings, saying that the vast majority of foodborne illnesses are associated with products regulated by the FDA -- including peanut butter.

The ongoing peanut butter Salmonella  outbreak has claimed nine lives and sickened more than 691 people in 46 states. It has been linked to Peanut Corporation of America, a company with faciities and operating conditions dangerous enough to prompt a Salmonella wrongful death lawsuit by national food safety law firm PritzkerOlsen Attorneys.

According to the report, a central problem at FDA is a bureacracy that includes three major food safety components that are all managed separately.

"No FDA official whose full time job is food safety hasline authority over all food safety functions,'' the report said. The three branches should immediately be consolidated at FDA, until a new Food Safety Administration can be created within the U.S. Health and Human Services, the report said. 

Full post as published by Food Poisoning Law Blog on March 26, 2009 (boomark / email).