Understanding Government

Eddie Gehman Kohan writes on Obama Foodorama (try reading “foodorama” ten times to yourself) about the Food & Drug Adminstration’s latest initiative to open up the food recall process to citizens.  The FDA database may not be blessed with the catchiest name (“Recalls, Market Withdrawals, & Safety Alerts”), but it might end up saving your health, time, and money.  It allows you to search by food item, by infection or illness that a contaminated or otherwise dangerous food product can cause, and by store.  My searches using terms like “salmonella”, “broccoli”, “sam’s club”, “ham”, “hillandale” and “wegmans” all turned up relatively recent product recalls, with specifics gleaned from company press releases.   The database might not reach out and stop you from buying something that could make you sick, but it’s a good way to check your fridge and shelves at home if you’ve heard rumors about a recall.

William Neuman’s (or his editor’s) effort in the New York Times to explain a very important issue — food poisoning — left me scratching my head.  Here’s the lede:

The federal government on Wednesday significantly cut its estimate of how many Americans get sick every year from tainted food.

But that does not mean that food poisoning is declining or that farms and factories are producing safer food. Instead, officials said, the government’s researchers are just getting better at calculating how much foodborne illness is out there.

According to new government estimates, three thousand Americans die every year from food poisoning, and 48 million get sick.  That’s the story, right?  Or do methodologies and research priorities interest America’s “paper of record” more?  (They’re certainly not what most Americans have time to pay attention to). (more…)

The trade off between safer eggs and the risk of a deadly salmonella outbreak is just pennies a dozen, according to a in-depth look at the industry by P.J. Huffstutter in the Los Angeles Times.

Slightly stricter guidelines in California have helped egg producers avoid bacterial contamination in recent years, but in an industry where the bottom line reigns supreme, tighter rules have caught on in only nine of the 50 states. (more…)

The Food and Drug Administration has ordered a recall of California-grown alfalfa sprouts linked to a new outbreak of salmonella. According to April Fulton of National Public Radio, the sprouts have left 22 people sick in 10 states. (more…)

Jane Zhang of the Wall Street Journal reports on the Obama administration’s plan to improve food safety:

A White House panel, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, is shifting the focus of food regulation to preventing outbreaks from reacting to them after they occur. The federal government will establish a command system to respond to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses and develop industry guidelines that will help the government track contaminated products, the panel said.

What the panel specifically has in mind, for now, is empowering the Food and Drug Administration to reduce salmonella contamination in raw or uncooked eggs by 60 percent or 79,000 cases each year. Egg producers will now be required to test for salmonella.

It will be interesting to see how far Obama will push for a better-inspected food supply before the food industry starts, ahem, crying foul. Right now the reputation of the FDA is at such a low that the industry is actually calling out for stronger regulations in order to boost consumer confidence.-MB