Food Poisoning Lawyer & Attorney : Marler Clark : Food Poison Journal

• Some have proposed a federal "superagency" that would take on the food safety responsibilities currently housed within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).  Some of the reasoning behind this idea was expressed early on in the article by food safety experts.

Dr. Pascal James Imperato, head of the department of preventive medicine and community health at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center commented, "Food is not produced, processed or distributed the way it was 20 to 30 years ago. Farming is now a major agribusiness, and it introduces a variety of problems that didn't exist before. It's much more complicated and can't be addressed by regulations that were written 30 years ago."

And Jessica Milano, author of "Spoiled: Keeping Tainted Food Off America's Tables", remarked, "You have a system that developed organically from the turn of the [20th] century. As economies developed with more commercial food manufacturers and multi-ingredient products, you have some overlaps and redundancies."

• Mandatory recall authority for the FDA is discussed as an option for improving food safety, but some say recall authority is not necessary since companies typically cooperate when FDA approaches them about recalling product.
  
• And, as mentioned yesterday, the safety of food imports is an important challenge going forward.  Today's article once again focused on imports:
  

The need for solutions is taking on added urgency, with the consumption of imported foods soaring in the last 10 years. Government statistics show that from 2003 to 2005 alone, food imports rose from 9.3 million shipments a year to 13.8 million shipments annually. Now, imported foods make up 13 percent of the typical American diet.

But, according to Milano, "as the volume of imports keeps rising but the number of [FDA] inspectors doesn't, the percentage of foods that is actually getting checked is getting squeezed."

The FDA's own statistics show that its inspectors sample only 1.3 percent of all food being sent to the United States from other countries.

• There is also much debate about the need for additional food inspectors, which is addressed in the article.  And an increase in food inspectors would result in an increase in the amount of food entering the country that would be inspected.  Imports and inspectors essentially go hand-in-hand.  FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach provided his views on inspections and food safety in regards to imports:
  

"But we realize the world is changing," von Eschenbach acknowledged during a November 2007 teleconference after the FDA presented its Food Protection Plan to the White House. "There was a time when we produced the food ourselves. Now we've noticed that much of this food comes to us 365 days a year, because it is being produced in other parts of the world.

"Globalization has radically changed our food supply and our food-supply chain," von Eschenbach added. And that means, he said, that the FDA needs to catch up with those changes.

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• Melamine in pet food, antifreeze in toothpaste, and chemical-contaminated fish feed resulted in large recalls of imported products this year.  Illness and death due to imported products such as these has increased American consumers' skepticism about whether imported foods are safe to eat.
  
• An increase in the availability of fresh produce year-round through import programs has led to an increase in the amount of food we consume that contain high levels of pesticides.  According to the article's authors, the source of the problem is under-funding and a lack of resources at the Food and Drug Administration:

Trouble is, inspections by the FDA -- either at the source of production or at the borders -- can't keep up. The agency is responsible for inspecting all imported foods with the exception of meat and egg products, which are covered by the Food Safety and Inspection Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Overall, "there's been an 81 percent drop [in FDA inspections] since 1972," noted Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, in Griffin. "That's a huge reduction, and, at the same time, compared to 1972, we have a huge amount more of food imports."

In fact, the FDA's own data show that the number of inspectors at its Office of Regulatory Affairs dropped from 1,642 in 2003 to 1,389 in 2005 -- even as food imports rose from 9.3 million shipments per year to more than 13.8 million shipments annually.

The reason for the shortfall is simple, Doyle said: "Reduced budgets."

• Finally, the article discusses the traceability of products.  In the United States, public health officials are fairly successful at identifying the source of outbreaks beyond a brand - they can trace spinach to a specific field or supplier and meat to a particular slaughter house.  But in developing countries, some of which we import from, trace-back systems are not fully in place and can complicate outbreak investigations.

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It took one of the largest-ever beef recalls -- 21.7 million pounds of frozen hamburger patties linked to severe illnesses -- in 2007 to make USDA officials question whether beef processors around the country were following safety guidelines when it came to E. coli contamination. The New Jersey-based Topps Meat Co., the producer behind the massive recall, certainly wasn't, USDA officials said.

"When we sent food-safety assessors into the Topps plant, we found that their policies they had in place were not being followed nearly as vigorously as they had been just two years ago when we did a food-safety assessment in the same plant," USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety Richard Raymond said in an interview.

The Topps event led to several tough questions. The first was whether the Topps situation was unique.

"We don't know if Topps was the tip of the iceberg and other plants have gotten sloppy, or Topps was kind of an isolated incident," Mr. Raymond said.

The appropriation is 12% more than the agency got for food safety in fiscal 2007. But half the increase will be eaten up by annual cost increases, including pay raises, and the FDA won't get the other half until July — and only then if it has a performance plan in place that lawmakers find adequate.

"In the budget climate we're in, any increase is better than nothing," says Scott Faber of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents foodmakers. "But we're disappointed and surprised in light of soaring imports and declining consumer confidence." A broad coalition of groups, including the GMA, have pushed for bigger food-safety increases in the past year because of a string of high-profile food recalls. The Coalition for a Stronger FDA, which includes three former secretaries of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, has sought 15% increases for the FDA for each of the next five years.

China is struggling to meet food safety demands from trading partners as it slowly modernizes a food production system still rooted in small-scale family farms, U.S. and Chinese officials said on Tuesday.

"China is a country in economic transition and it has a mixture of traditional problems and modern problems that both coexist," Wu Yongning, an official at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a seminar on food safety at a Washington think tank.

Those problems, he said, now range from improper food preparation on family-run farms to shortcuts taken on industrial chicken farms.

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With so many imports, the government can't inspect everything at the border, he said, so it needs a different strategy. The new plan would use third parties to do mandatory safety certification of riskier products before they are allowed into the country. That would mean more American personnel in key foreign ports, Leavitt said.

Information about certified firms and importers who use only certified firms would be made public, and the use of electronic tracking technologies would also be expanded.

The plan would also increase fines against violators, including raising the cap on civil penalties from less than $2 million to $10 million, and giving the Food and Drug Administration power to recall food products if companies act too slowly.

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The Washington Post reported today on the Bush Administration's decision to ramp up inspections of products, including food, being imported into the United States.  The decision comes after several products imported from China were recalled in recent months. According to the Washington Post:

The plan is something of a departure for the administration, which has generally opposed increasing regulation. Its import-safety proposal aims to keep hazardous food and products from entering the country through targeted inspections of high-risk products or producers, and increased cooperation with foreign governments and among U.S. agencies.

Although the plan includes some proposals being considered by Congress, such as making it illegal to sell recalled products, it fell short of advocating many of the changes Democratic lawmakers have called for, including consolidating the disjointed system for food safety into a single agency.

Prospects for the administration plan are unclear. Some proposals would require action by the Democratic Congress. And the cost of the plan will not be determined until the administration releases its fiscal 2009 budget next year.

The CBS2/Sun investigation uncovered repeated temperature violations while meat was in transport. CBS2 surveillance cameras caught restaurant and grocery store owners shipping meat out of state in trunks of cars, in minivans and non-refrigerated trucks while temperatures outside reached as high as 95 degrees.

Also uncovered in the probe was a lack of food inspectors to investigate after trucks hauling meat are involved in crashes and refrigeration units are destroyed.

In one case, 30,000 pounds of turkey - destined to be turned into deli meat - sat in warm September temperatures for six and a half hours. CBS2 cameras documented boxes of turkey that were crushed and meat that was exposed, thawing and dripping from the heat.

The load became tainted when the truck struck a viaduct near Chicago's stockyard district. No food inspector was called, as Illinois law mandates. Instead it was transferred to a new refrigerated trailer, cooled down overnight, then shipped the next day to a Chicago warehouse operated by Ashland Cold Storage.

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