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Will the Westland/Hallmark Recall Prompt Action by Congress?

By Pritzker | Ruohonen

Iowa Senator Dick Durbin and Connecticut Represestative Rosa DeLauro have called for a new department that would focus exclusively on food safety. Delauro stated in a U.S. News story, "Food safety ought to be of a high enough priority that we have a single agency that deals with it and not an agency that is responsible for promoting a product, selling a product, and then as an afterthought dealing with how our food supply is safe [this could be said of both the FDA and the USDA]."

Although the creation of a new department is not likely, recent foodborne outbreaks and massive recalls have made food safety a hot topic in Congress.  The U.S. News story ("Just how safe is our food?") highlights some of the issues surrounding the safety of our meat supply:

One point of contention is the quality and rigor of the inspection process, including the training and size of the inspector force. Currently, the USDA employs 7,500 inspectors for 6,300 federal plants, the majority of which are slaughterhouses. That's roughly one inspector per plant, although in practice teams of inspectors tend to cover multiple plants. The USDA is also currently operating with an overall vacancy rate of 9 percent for inspectors, officials said.

Food safety groups have voiced criticism over these numbers, saying that there are too few eyeballs watching too much meat. "The USDA is underfunded and understaffed," said Sarah Kline of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food safety watchdog. "We are talking about enormous facilities with inspectors needing to be at different points in the facilities. What you end up with is a lot of beef that is not being looked at."

A second question among politicians is whether the USDA is doing enough to make sure that plants have adequate safety plans in place. In 2002, an administrator for the USDA, Garry McKee, told members of the meatpacking lobby that many so-called safety protocols were simply ineffective. "Plants are not validating their interventions," he said. "Consequently they are not killing pathogens or even reducing them in their plants. Some are not even recognizing that pathogens exist. That's like playing catch with a hornet's nest and not recognizing you might get stung."

. . . Not to be entirely eclipsed by policy issues is the question of proper farming practice. In December, researchers at Kansas State University found that cattle fed with distiller's grain, an ethanol byproduct, are more likely to carry the strain of E. coli that causes illness in humans. With ethanol demand booming, plants have turned to distiller's grain as a cheap feed source. But like other farming practices designed to more quickly fatten cattle, it may also be contributing to more risky meat as cattle become more prone to illness.

The time for Congress to act is now.

Full post as published by Food Poisoning Law Blog on February 23, 2008 (boomark / email).