It's tough enough these days just finding enough money to put food on the table, and Americans shouldn't also have to worry about whether it's safe to eat, Vice President Biden said today as he announced proposals to make the U.S. food supply more safe.
Biden and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced recommendations from President Obama's Food Safety Working Group, a panel of administration officials and outside experts created in March. Biden and Sebelius are co-chairs of the group.
"The focus is to have a completely different emphasis than we've had in the past," Biden said. "We're going to make our new priority preventing (contamination) from happening in the first place." Coming changes, which can be enacted without Congressional approval:
*Within 90 days, an improved individual alert system at www.foodsafety.gov to give consumers immediate access to "critical food-safety information" such as recalls.
*New safeguards designed to cut salmonella in raw eggs, E. coli in ground beef and other pathogens in leafy greens, melons and tomatoes.
*A better tracking system to pinpoint the origins of outbreaks.
*Better communications between agencies that regulate food safety.
*New positions at the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to oversee food safety.
George Washington University food-safety expert Michael Taylor began work Monday as senior adviser to FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg. He calls the recommendations "a huge undertaking. It's a transformative strategy."
The new proposals give the FDA "real teeth" in requiring companies to track food-safety problems and make that information available to the government, Taylor says. It will require public-health-oriented performance standards and risk-based inspection programs.
For example, in this summer's recall of Nestle Toll House Brand refrigerated cookie dough, it was revealed that when FDA inspectors toured the plant, the company -- well within its rights under current rules -- refused to provide inspectors with complaint logs, pest-control records and other information. Under the new rules, the company would be required to do so, Taylor says.
The switch won't be easy. "It's going to take all hands on deck at FDA to figure out how to do this right," he says.
This has been a bad spring andsummer for food safety, with outbreaks of salmonella in peanut butter and powdered milk, and E. coli in refrigerated cookie dough and beef.
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