FDA and Food News Is Everywhere

It’s not that there are no other topics to blog about, it’s just that this one seems to be everywhere every day.  And I think we would all like to get to the bottom of this if at all possible.

I just heard Maura Liasson on National Public Radio discussing the state of the FDA with yet another expert, revealing newsworthy commentary from Europe.  A Belgian representative from that country’s  food agency said they simply follow the good advice that came from the FDA in the 1990′s: follow the whole chain of food responsibility from the farm producing it all the way to the store taking delivery for sale to the public.  So what has happened since then to deconstruct a system here still used successfully in Europe?

The consensus is that the agency is not proactive but reactive, the boundaries of their authority are not conducive to creating material changes in the system they are presumed to protect–they have no mandate to go after problems and fix them–and authority is dispersed  among other agencies like the USDA.  Effective coordination is elusive, possibly politically improbable.  NPR’s Joanne Silberner reports : “The FDA … doesn’t have the legal tools or the resources, the staff and inspectors to prevent these outbreaks,” according to Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.  It does not help that the FDA has had a Commissioner for a total of only six out of the last twelve years.

The Peanut Corporation of America in Georgia, responsible for the latest outbreak of salmonella in pet treats and human foods with peanuts and peanut paste, had salmonella contamination reports filed dating back to late 2007.  They were not shut down.  PCA continued to purchase contaminated peanuts in moldy bags, purported to be from a Canadian source.  The FDA’s attitude is, as reported on blogtalkradio by two former long-time agency operations and packaging specialists, that since there were no reports of illness, the practice and sale of tainted food could continue. The laws covering adulterated food are ignored.

In a case of the “fox guarding the hen house” as reported tonight by Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Stewart Parnell, President of the now infamous Peanut Corporation of America and currently under criminal investigation, is also a member of the USDA’s Peanut Standards Board(PSB)set up during the Bush Administration.

Olbermann says Parnell was reappointed to the PSB last October and recently claimed its mandate is not to prevent salmonella in peanut products, but rather is responsible for other things like agricultural safety, how much moisture peanuts can safely contain before they are put on the store shelf, and assuring that peanuts sold in this country are healthful. Olberman notes this “suspiciously looks like the kind of things overlooked by a peanut company executive, while trying to cut safety costs at peanut companies, [that]could lead to a national fatal salmonella outbreak.”

Domestic and import  failures at FDA signal time for significant agency overhaul. Massive importation of food at the onset of globalization with an agency sorely lacking preparedness for the variables of the world’s standards may have been understood more than fifteen years ago, but now?  Then there’s the China whistleblower who says melamine is just the tip of the iceberg. Yet we test less than 100 small samples per year of only known red-flagged ingredients.  What strategies are being implemented to keep “food safety” from becoming just another empty slogan?

And what inadequacies lead to cases like PCA right here, where there’s no outside agent to blame? Yes, human error will happen, greed overcomes those in charge sometimes, but 18 months of PCA quality reports that swung wildly in describing product shipment conditions with no intervention, FDA or USDA, and sadly, no whistleblowers…it’s stunning.

For the latest updates on this story, check the FDA for daily updates.

If you’d like to hear an hour long but worthwhile interview with the two former FDA agents mentioned above, you can get a good grasp of what’s happening at the FDA and what’s not here.  At the conclusion you may have to get a grip.  My jaw dropped in disbelief a couple of times…still nursing the bruises!