Food Poisoning & Food Safety Violations Focus on FDA
With all the food poisoning and food safety issues of late, the Food and Drug Administration came under heavy criticism by a House panel for its handling of recent food-safety violations. In addition, the administration has disclosed plans to establish a working group to review the safety of food and other imports. Of course, this should have been done sooner.
With concern mounting because of recent incidents involving not only tainted food but also toothpaste, tires and other products from China, a White House official said the administration is forming a panel on import safety to be chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt that will include other Cabinet officers.
The FDA inspects less than 1 percent of the imported food it is responsible for monitoring -- including seafood, fruits and vegetables -- and only a small fraction of those inspections include taking samples of products for testing, subcommittee investigators found. In San Francisco, FDA employees who review hundreds of shipments a day have an average of 30 seconds to decide whether each needs further investigation, according to subcommittee investigators.
Last month, the FDA began requiring Chinese importers of five types of seafood, including catfish, to show that their products had been tested for banned antibiotics. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, about 13 percent of the average American's diet is imported food, and imports of FDA-regulated food have more than doubled since 2000, to 9 million shipments in 2006. That includes a 350 percent increase in the value of U.S. imports of Chinese agricultural and seafood products, from $880 million in 1996 to $4 billion in 2006.
Hopefully, significant changes will result and food safety will receive the attention it deserves. Too many innocent people suffer when the government fails to maintain appropriate over-sight of our food supply. Unfortunately, there have been too many incidents to trust food safety to the food suppliers and the food industry.
