Most of us like to take the American food supply pretty much for granted, so a string of contaminations and recalls in the past year have become disturbing. Contaminated foods have included peanut butter carrying salmonella and spinach harboring E. coli.
With each outbreak of foodborne illness, the government had ostensibly launched investigations to figure out what was contaminating the food and how it got there.
Today, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing to address the contaminations resulting in recalls. It is imperative that the subcommittee, whose members include U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., get to the bottom of how this occurred.
According to a story published Monday in The Washington Post, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has known all along about festering contamination problems in these very industries. The newspaper obtained documents showing the FDA had evidence of the problems but had taken only limited actions to address them. The FDA had gotten complaints about salmonella contamination at a ConAgra Foods factory in Georgia in 2005. Government inspectors followed up, but when they encountered resistance from company managers, who refused to provide necessary documentation, the inspectors backed off, according to the Washington Post story. Subsequently, a widespread salmonella outbreak ensued and, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 425 people in 44 states became sickened.
The FDA also knew about contamination of greens in the Salinas Valley in California dating back to 1995 – long before it turned into a crisis. In 2005, the FDA was aware of 18 outbreaks of E. coli contamination of fresh-cut lettuces and another in spinach. The most recent E. coli outbreak over the last six months sickened more than 200 people in 26 states and killed three.
Along with the spinach and peanut butter contaminations, there have been other problems, most notably the dog and cat poisonings caused by pet food laced with the industrial chemical melamine.
The FDA contends it is responsible for a large and growing number of food processors and has had to deal with a huge increase in regulating imported foods. Officials have acknowledged that the agency must be reorganized and beefed up to meet a changing mission.
It is incumbent upon Congress to look closely at how the FDA conducts itself and ensure the agency is able to carry out the important mission of guarding our food supply.
