Food safety reform moves closer to becoming a reality: Legislation now under consideration
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* Teddi Dineley Johnson

To Robyn Allgood, blending fresh spinach into fruit smoothies seemed the perfect way to meet her kids’ nutritional needs.

But on Sept. 15, 2006, a Food and Drug Administration warning about contaminated spinach sent the Idaho mother of three running to the refrigerator to throw away an open bag. The warning came too late, however.

Two-year-old Kyle Allgood fell ill the next day. Crying out in pain, the inconsolable toddler was admitted to a local hospital. A few days later, on Sept. 20, 2006, within hours of being transferred by plane to a hospital in Salt Lake City, Kyle developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a type of kidney failure caused by *Escherichia coli* bacteria, and suffered a fatal heart attack.

The Allgoods later learned that Kyle had eaten spinach tainted with a leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States, E. coli 0157:H7. If the FDA warning had come just two days earlier, Kyle would never have eaten the spinach, Allgood said at an April news conference in Washington, D.C., where dozens of victims of food-borne illness, including people who had lost loved ones due to contaminated food, gathered in the U.S. Capitol to tell their stories and urge legislators to reform the nation’s food safety system.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 76 million cases of food-borne disease occur each year in the United States, causing about 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. The most severe cases tend to occur in the very old, the very young, those with compromised immune systems, and in healthy people exposed to a very high dose of a pathogen.

“What’s scary is that a food-borne pathogen can’t be seen, and once someone is sick there is no way to reverse it,” said Allgood, fighting back tears. “It was terrible to watch our son suffer and not be able to take away his pain, but now we just want to lend our voice to encouraging food safety.”

Allgood’s voice has not gone unnoticed. Around the nation, outraged victims of tragedies tied to tainted foods are stepping forward to join their voices with those of food safety advocates, industry groups, consumer groups, policy-makers, public health professionals and others looking to the current Congress for a long-overdue overhaul of the nation’s food safety system.

“Reaction, not prevention, has too long formed the basis of our nation’s food safety system,” said APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP (E). “Americans cannot afford to lose faith in their food.”

FDA is an overwhelmed agency with an ever-growing mandate, food safety advocates say. The agency has been chronically underfunded for years, they say, and its focus has long been on the drug and medical device side rather than on food safety.

“Reforming the food safety functions at FDA will take more than a few quick fixes,” Richard Hamburg, MPA, director of government relations at Trust for America’s Health, told *The Nation’s Health*. “Instead, we need an overhaul from top to bottom on how we prevent, detect and respond to food-borne illnesses.”

To be sure, legislators’ plates are already piled high with issues related to energy reform, the economy and health reform, but there is still room for food safety, said David W. Plunkett, JD, JM, food safety program attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

“There are a lot of things for Congress to deal with, but the stars are aligned for food safety reform,” Plunkett said. “We have a collision of a lot of different interests coming together to urge action on reforming FDA. Industry is pushing for it. We have had outbreaks, so consumers are concerned about it. And we have consumer advocacy organizations that have for years been working on reform, and a Congress that is receptive to their messages. I am hopeful we will see the House and Senate work on bills this year and complete them before the current session of Congress ends.”

Recurring national outbreaks of food-borne illness and FDA warnings due to contamination of a variety of fresh and processed foods — including tainted peanuts, pistachios, spinach, lettuce, salad mixes, pet food, tomatoes, peppers, pot pies, ground beef and infant formula — have shaken many consumers’ confidence in the overall safety of the food supply. Food safety advocates say the recent salmonella outbreak in peanuts and peanut products supplied by Georgia-based Peanut Corporation of America, which led to the largest recall in U.S. history and caused nine deaths, was a rallying call.

![Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/nathealth/39/5/1.3/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/39/5/1.3/F1)

U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., holds up a jar of candy peanut products during a February congressional hearing on the salmonella outbreaks that led to a massive peanut product recall.

Photo by Mark Wilson, courtesy Getty Images

“It demonstrated everything that was wrong with our current food safety system,” Plunkett said. “Everything that could go wrong did.”

Setting the stage for a food safety reform debate, a flurry of food safety bills have surfaced on both sides of the Capitol this year. APHA supports comprehensive food safety legislation that provides several key reforms, including enforcement authority; public education; grants to help state and local governments and CDC build their food-borne illness detection, surveillance, laboratory and response capacity; and recall authority. Neither FDA nor the U.S. Department of Agriculture currently has mandatory recall authority for food.

“That means they can ask that companies voluntarily recall potentially contaminated products, but they can’t require them to do so and have no legal recourse to force a recall,” according to Dara Alpert Lieberman, government relations manager at Trust for America’s Health. “With the notable exception of the Peanut Corporation of America case, most companies will recall when FDA asks them to, because if they don’t the agencies could always publish that they urged the companies to recall the products and were refused. Mandatory recall authority is needed for those worst-case scenarios when the company does not do an adequate job of recalling a product.”

President Barack Obama added his own voice to the growing chorus on March 14 when he devoted his weekly radio address to food safety. During the broadcast, Obama announced the creation of a Food Safety Working Group that is advising him on modernizing the nation’s food safety laws, many of which, he said, “have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt.”

The current statutes that underpin FDA’s food safety functions date back to 1906 and 1938, and were drafted to respond to problems that were prevalent in the early 20th century. Food safety advocates say the archaic laws have given rise to inadequate funding, confusion and a fragmented food system that divides responsibility for food safety primarily between FDA, which regulates 80 percent of the food supply, and USDA, which oversees meat and poultry products.

![Figure2](http://www.thenationshealth.org/http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/nathealth/39/5/1.3/F2.medium.gif)

[Figure2](http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/39/5/1.3/F2)

At an April news conference on Capitol Hill, Randy Napier, at lectern, of Medina, Ohio, talks about his mother, who died after eating peanut butter contaminated with salmonella.

Photo by Teddi Dineley Johnson

FDA inspects the food facilities it oversees only about once every 10 years, said Tony Corbo, MS, a legislative representative at Food and Water Watch.

“There is no statutory requirement for FDA to inspect at any specific frequency,” Corbo told *The Nation’s Health*. “On the other hand, USDA, by statute, is supposed to inspect on a daily basis.”

A reformed food system would give FDA the power and resources to regulate food safety properly, Corbo said.

“They wind up spending all of their resources trying to mitigate the problems that occur,” he said. “We want FDA to have a preventative food safety model put in place. It would give them the regulatory authority to set up food safety standards for the products they regulate and performance standards for the industry to reach, and increase the inspection frequency of FDA to make sure foods being produced are safe.”

Though Capitol Hill lawmakers face a crowded legislative agenda, Corbo agrees with many policy analysts and consumer watchdogs that the timing is optimal to pass food safety reform legislation.

“The question is, ‘Where is it going to line up in the queue?’” he asked.

To take action on food safety, visit APHA’s advocacy page at [http://action.apha.org/site/PageNavigator/Advocacy](http://action.apha.org/site/PageNavigator/Advocacy). For more information, visit [www.healthyamericans.org](http://www.healthyamericans.org) or [www.foodandwaterwatch.org](http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org).

*   Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association