The Food Safety Modernization Act

            In this blog post, I would like to talk about the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 which supposedly revamped the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. To start off, I want to share a story with you. In 2012, 6 year old Owen Carrignan complained about a stomachache after getting home from a friend’s house. Less than a week later, Owen was dead from E. coli. To make matters worse, State Health officials could never find out what contaminated food killed Owen and another person, and eventually closed the investigation.

            I understand that we cannot make the system perfect, but we can always do better. What makes this story truly tragic is that it happened after the Food Safety Modernization Act was passed which supposedly gave the FDA more powers in order to better protect us, and we still have more deaths than any other developed country. The CDC estimates that 1 in 6 Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3000 die of food borne diseases. When compared the France, The United Kingdom, and Australia, which have less than 500 deaths, it seems a little high.

           

            For example, in 2011 a Listeria outbreak, caused by infected Cantaloupes grown in Colorado, killed 33 people and sickened approximately 150 people. Now around four years later, after the changes have been implemented, another Listeria outbreak has occurred, caused by infected Blue Bell products. As of April 21, 2015 ten people have been infected and 3 deaths have occurred. The FDA is not able to follow through on all the new procedures laid out in the Act implemented in 2010, because it has to procure its funding through Congress. And, Congress is lobbied by the Food industry, which has some motivation for keeping the FDA weaker than it should be.

            Congress has provided less than half of the estimated 580 million dollars needed for the FDA to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act. The FDA has requested $263 million in their last budget request, with $229 million coming from user fees on food companies. The FDA uses user fees to fund a number of its other programs. Congress, though, has rejected the proposed budget, because of food industry lobbying. Though funding is not the only problem the FDA is facing. The FDA suffers from a condition of under staffing and under training, but those problems could be fixed if the FDA had more money to spend.

            And, to add a nice confusing bureaucratic layer to our food system, the Food Safety Modernization Act, even if the FDA gets funding from Congress, does not apply to 20% of our food supply. Most meats and poultry products are regulated and inspected by the US Department of Agriculture. Slaughterhouses are required to have a USDA inspector, but those inspectors do not have the power to shut down a slaughterhouse or issue a recall if there is a threat.

            In conclusion, the Food Safety Modernization Act has the potential to enact sweeping changes within our food industry, prevent many future deaths, and saves us billions of dollars, but that might be jeopardized because of lack of funding in the present and food industry lobbying. The Act has already provided many benefits. For example, the FDA now has the power to issue recalls on contaminated foods, which is a power it did not have before 2010. All it would take to make the complete adoption of all the changes to the FDA in the Food Safety Modernization Act would be for the Food industry to start paying user fees, and I think $230 million split across several food corporations is a small price for them to pay in order to protect their consumers.