The Safety Gap: Food Fight
Reported May 04, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — Seventy-six million Americans will get sick. Three-hundred-twenty-five thousand will be hospitalized. Five-thousand will die. These aren’t statistics about cancer or diabetes they’re linked to the number of people who will eat tainted food in a year. It’s an issue that impacts everyone, everyday. More imports are coming in, with fewer inspectors to look at them. Could it be the recipe for a national health disaster?
From peanuts
“This appears to be the largest food recall of products in U.S. history,” Michael Hansen, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Consumer’s Union in Washington, D.C., told Ivanhoe.
To spinach
“It’s almost like they’re not inspecting at all,” Caroline Smith DeWaal, Director of the Program on Food Safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C., told Ivanhoe.
To tomatoes
“Life is never normal once you go through something like that,” Richard Miller, sickened by E. coli, told Ivanhoe.
Is our food supply the real enemy?
“No child should have to have died the way he died, no child.”
Two-year-old Kevin Kowalcyk’s family thought he had a bad case of the flu.
“The lab report came back that it was positive for E. coli,” Kowalcyk’s grandmother, Pat Buck, told Ivanhoe.
It turned out to be a deadly strain of bacteria that came from something he ate.
“He crashed by having a heart attack,” Buck said. “His little body swelled up to three-times his normal size. Then he had his third heart attack, and then he died.”
Buck uses her heartache to fuel her mission. She runs the Center for Food Borne Illness Research and Prevention.
“This is unacceptable, and I will work as hard as I can talking to people about it so they understand.”
A recent Harvard study found more than six in 10 Americans have little confidence that food manufacturers and government inspections keep food safe. Experts say their skepticism is legit.
“These are signs of a Food and Drug Administration that’s really not capable of controlling problems in the food supply,” DeWaal told Ivanhoe.
DeWaal routinely testifies before Congress about the problems in the FDA. The agency is in charge of 80 percent of the food supply.
“FDA really has mission impossible,” DeWaal said.
The FDA regulates more than $1 trillion dollars in consumer goods. That’s 25 cents of every consumer dollar — everything from lipstick to lima beans. Complicating the issue: A dozen other federal and state agencies bear some responsibility for keeping an eye on our food.
“Ideally, yes, there should be a single food safety agency, and it should have the money that it needs and the legal authority, and it should be independent,” Dr. Hansen said.
Consumer groups say imported foods are one of the biggest problems. About 25,000 FDA-regulated food shipments arrive daily from 100 countries. They account for 80 percent of the U.S.’s seafood and nearly 70 percent of its fresh fruit and vegetables. Yet, only 1 percent is inspected. Since 1990, the volume of imports increased more than 900 percent, and as for the number of inspectors
“We have the components of the agency that had 1,100 staffers six years ago, and now have 700, and those are people responsible for food safety,” Steve Grossman, President of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA in Silver Spring, Md., told Ivanhoe.
“The food safety functions at the FDA have really been the stepchild at the agency,” DeWaal said. “It doesn’t get enough resources.”
The FDA is set to receive a little over $2 billion this year. That’s comparable to one school district’s budget in one county in Maryland.
“The superintendent of schools is covering maybe 100 square miles, and the commissioner is worrying about the world — same amount of money,” Grossman said.
No one would like to see a food safety overhaul more than Richard and Linda Miller.
“My family went through absolute hell,” Richard said.
They both got sick after eating green onions laced with E. coli at a restaurant. Linda recovered. Richard contracted hepatitis A and went into liver failure.
“It’s like a nightmare, and you’re living it,” Richard said.
Four others died from the same outbreak. Richard was forced to have a liver transplant. He depends on dozens of medications to stay alive.
“I pray that people get their heads screwed on straight and demand that our food supply is much safer than it is,” he said.
Safety on the home front that starts at the dinner table.
President Obama recently announced the creation of a Food Safety Working Group that will advise him on which laws and regulations need to be changed or better enforced. Meanwhile, private industry is taking the lead to develop technology that will track food from farm to fork. IBM is partnering with Norway’s largest food supplier to develop sensors that will allow consumers to trace the food anywhere in the supply chain. The FDA refused all requests for interviews for this story.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Center for Food Borne Illness
http://www.fooborneillness.org
[email protected]
