Public+Policy+-+Food+Safety+Policy


 * Food Safety Policy**

Most people do not think about foodborne illness until they become ill from unknowingly consuming contaminated food. While the food supply in the United States is one of the safest in the world, CDC from the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that each year 76 million cases of foodborne illness occur and more than 300,000 persons are hospitalized and 5,000 die from foodborne illness. Foodborne disease is caused by eating contaminated foods. In addition, poisonous chemicals, or other harmful substances can cause foodborne diseases if they are present in food. For example, recent foodborne disease such as // E. coli // and // Salmonella // were found in food such as fresh spinach and hamburger as well as peanut butter and tomatoes, respectively. These presences in food consumption are a major reason that ensuring a safer food supply has become more challenging as Americans both choose a greater variety of foods from a continually expanding global supply and consume an increasing amount of foods prepared outside and inside the home. It is because of the continuing threat of food-borne illness and the increasing complexity of the food supply that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) have deemed the protection of our nation's food supply a high priority. The DHHS is organized to link science to its mission. The FDA is the lead agency for applying the food and environmental laboratory science to support the regulatory and non-regulatory food safety goals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is primarily responsible for the epidemiology and laboratory science to support the infectious and non-infectious disease prevention goals while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the premier agency for basic and clinical biomedical research. These agencies promote food safety, help prevent foodborne disease, and mitigate the clinical and social impact of infectious and noninfectious illnesses. Unfortunately, the food safety policy does not absolutely guarantee American’s safety from food hazard. President Obama noted that many of the nation's food-safety laws “have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt,” and said the FDA was “underfunded and understaffed” during Bush's tenure. Obama said that outbreaks of illness from contaminated food have risen from 100 a year in the 1990s to 350 a year now and that only 5 percent of the nation's 150,000 food processing plants are inspected each year. “That is a hazard to public health,” he said. “It is unacceptable.” The problem that lies in the food safety policy is the fact that the private audits are only given the role to examine the procedure of manufacturing the food products. They were not paid to examine the food supplies imported from another place. On a recent outbreak, Salmonella was found in peanut butter, which led to a recall to every peanut butter product in the market. The peanut company was investigated in advance, and Eugene A. Hatfield was called into question. Mr. Hatfield, who audited the peanut plant for the American Institute of Baking, referred questions to the organization, which said he “is degreed in biology” and “trained to do the job.” He headed to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in southwest Georgia to make sure its chopped nuts, paste and peanut butter were safe to use in things as diverse as granola bars and ice cream. However, Mr. Hatfield was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella, which he was not required to test for anyway. While Mr. Hatfield was inspecting the plant to reassure Kellogg and other food companies of its suitability as a supplier, the Peanut Corporation was paying for his efforts. He checked to see that the plant had a system in place to test its products for contamination, but the audit indicated that he did not ask to see any test results for salmonella and therefore did not know that the plant had found the bacteria. “I never thought that this bacteria would survive in the peanut butter type environment,” Mr. Hatfield wrote to a food safety expert on Jan. 20, after the deadly salmonella outbreak was made public, according to a copy of his e-mail message. It seemed that Mr. Hatfield failed to find the presences of the salmonella, but his job was to inspect only the procedure the manufacturing, so his role to ensure the safety of food consumption was limited. He did not have the ability to inspect the shipped food supplies that are used as ingredients for the food product. Thus, a food expert like Mr. Hatfield could not possibly spot this foodborne disease. Federal investigators later discovered that the dilapidated plant was ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste for at least nine months. But they were too late to prevent what has become one of the nation’s worst known outbreaks of food-borne disease in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an estimated 22,500 were sickened. With government inspectors overwhelmed by the task of guarding the nation’s food supply, the job of monitoring food plants has in large part fallen to an army of private auditors like Mr. Hatfield, and the problems go well beyond peanuts. After the recent incident with the foodborne illness outbreak, President Obama criticized and accused the Bush administration of creating a “hazard to public health” by failing to control food contamination problems. Thus, he announced new leadership and other changes aimed at modernizing food-safety laws. He is forming a Food Safety Working Group to “upgrade our food safety laws for the 21st century,” and he formally named former New York City health chief Margaret A. Hamburg as his new Food and Drug Administration commissioner. He also will ask Congress for $1 billion in new funds to add inspectors and modernize laboratories and announced that the Agriculture Department will ban all sick or disabled cattle from entering the food supply. The food safety policy seemed to lack the complete procedures to protect every American from food hazards. President Obama saw this as a challenging opportunity and worked to reform it by improving the regulation on food. The government is still finding ways to prevent foodborne diseases from contaminating food before the victim becomes sick from them. Protecting the safety of the food and drugs is one of the most fundamental responsibilities government has.

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