Where's the Food Safety Net?

Tag : Canned Food

In early June, McDonald's ( MCD ), Burger King ( BKC ), and several other U.S. restaurants disposed of their redtomatoes, while Wal-Mart Stores ( WMT ) stopped selling certain varieties. They were responding to anoutbreak of salmonella that by then had affected 17 states and putat least 23 people in the hospital, according to the Food & DrugAdministration.

For the FDA's embattled food safety inspectors, the salmonellascare was more evidence that a chronic lack of money and manpowerhas left the agency reacting to such events rather than preventingthem in the first place—a longtime goal. Stephen Sundlof, whoruns the FDA's Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition, hasrecently wondered if his people can handle more than one big crisisat a time—say, a nationwide outbreak of E. coli andsalmonella. "[We're] near the breaking point," he says.
The situation is so dire that the Bush Administration has made anextraordinary request to add $275 million to its proposed 2009budget for the FDA. The move follows an even more unusual plea fromagency Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach for the same amount inemergency funding for fiscal 2008. Meanwhile, a coalition of 180companies, industry groups, consumer advocates, and patient groupsare pushing for more money and people at the FDA.

In recent years the FDA has found itself with more and more to do:nutrition labeling, regulating dietary supplements, ensuring thesafety of surging food imports. Yet since 2004 the agency has lostnearly a third of its food safety and field staffers, and many moreare expected to retire soon. To check all the food productionfacilities around the world at the current rate of inspectionswould take 1,900 years. Sundlof jokes, grimly, that he'd like toget that down to 1,500 years.

Critical equipment also is in short supply. Researchers at an FDAlab near San Francisco were testing a Chinese herbal supplementrecently to see if it was fit for human consumption. They fired uptheir mass spectrophotometer, a $150,000 machine that can detecttiny amounts of toxic substances, and inserted a sample. Not onlydid the machine pick up high levels of mercury, but there was somuch of the metal they had to shut down the machine to be cleaned.Since the lab has only one mass spectrophotometer, all such testscame to a halt for two weeks.

The food safety system hasn't collapsed, say current and former FDAemployees, thanks to a strong sense of mission and sacrifice. Staffhave been known to use their own credit cards to buy suspectproducts. Interrupting vacations or working all night is common.

But the daily struggle to do more with less has seriousimplications for safety. The FDA suspected Cold Stone Creamery icecream of making people sick with salmonella in 2005 but lacked thetest required to prove the contamination. It had to turn to theUniversity of Georgia's Food Science & Technology Dept. for helpfinding the bacteria. And since it spends so much time reacting toemergencies, the FDA ends up neglecting routine tasks. "Aregulation I started in 1998 to reduce the risk of salmonella ineggs has still not hit the street," says one recent retiree. "Partof the reason I left is that I didn't have much hope" that theproblems would get better.

Some 35 years after the U.S. thought botulism in canned food washistory, the bacterial toxin appeared last summer in chili saucemade in a Georgia plant run by Castleberry's Brands. Why? Fieldstaff say they were too busy to examine new technology thatCastleberry's was using in its plants—technology that turnedout to be flawed.
Agency staff have long wanted to put in place a system thatprevents food crises before they happen. But there are no resourcesfor such an effort. And when the agency proposed new safetyregulations on produce last year, the Bush Administration nixed therequest.