A Relentless Focus On Prevention, Or Something

national food policy conference 2009Food safety and child nutrition were topics at this year’s National Food Policy Conference.  Bringing together the food industry, public health officials, consumer advocacy groups, and the government, the conference makes a concerted effort to demonstrate progressive action on key issues facing the nation and its food supply.

The Child Nutrition Act is due to be reauthorized this October.  However, many suspect it will be delayed while Congress focuses on health care and climate bills.  The House passed a transformative food safety bill just before the summer recess.  The Senate is expected to secure its own version of a food safety bill soon, but that may be delayed as well.

Making this past week a buffet for food policy junkies,  the United Fresh Produce Association is also holding a week-long session called the Washington Public Policy Conference (WPPC).  The foodie celebrities of Obama’s administration will all be making appearances during both conferences.  Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius gave the keynote address to the National Food Policy Conference, while Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack made the keynote address at the WPPC.  More “celebs” include FDA commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg and Deputy Ag Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, of memo fame.  They will be attending both conferences.

Secretary Sebelius congratulated the FDA, USDA, and the CDC for working together these past few months to prevent food-borne illnesses and other food-related diseases like obesity and diabetes.  Their new goal is “a relentless focus on prevention”.  She promises that rather than waiting for illness to appear, these governmental bodies will be proactive, not reactive.  She uses her own agency’s focus on flu preparedness as example.  The CDC is working on reducing salt in processed foods and taxing soda in order to fight obesity.  Additionally, Secretary Vilsack is encouraging farm to school programs to make better school lunches.  To further emphasize their forward thinking and commitment to consumer health, they rolled out the user friendly website foodsafety.gov.  Foodsafety.gov has been around for a while, but this is version 2.0 with its easy-to-read format and network links.

Then there is the Reportable Food Registry.  I’ll let Obama Foodorama take this one:

Yesterday, FDA introduced their own new electronic gadget for food safety, the Reportable Food Registry, and this one is focused on producers. It’s an online portal where food producers can self-report bad pathogen testing results for their food products directly to the FDA. This is not a new imitative, but was created by legislation in 2007, though it just went live yesterday (Sept. 8th). The idea is to have a paperless centralized location where producers can report problems, and FDA can track them. But while it was nice to put out a big press release during Food Policy Week, there are tractor-trailer size holes in using the Reportable Food Registry as anything other than a historical archive for noting the existence of poisoned food. Just a couple of the issues:

1) What about the bad actors? If a food producer is actually responsible enough to test food regularly, the producer is probably responsible enough to pick up the phone, and call the FDA, and advise that there’s a lot of poison food in the food chain. And the producer is probably responsible enough to recall it on their own. Bad producers are neither testing, nor reporting, are they? The registry is almost penalizing the good guys…

2) Pretty please with sugar on top will you get your poison food out of the marketplace?: FDA still can’t do mandatory food recalls, so who cares if a producer reports a poison batch? The batch can remain in the marketplace as long as no one makes a move to get it out, because it still requires a bouquet of roses and lots of kissy noises for FDA to convince producers to recall their poison products. Recalls remain voluntary, and that’s what turns this portal into an archive. The poison food is noted, not necessarily retrieved. FDA needs those recall powers.

3) Don’t tell…cuz we ain’t askin’: Producers who discover poison test results but then destroy the poison food don’t have to make a report. Huh? Your production facility is so filthy that you’ve created poison food, but if you throw the food away, FDA doesn’t need to know how filthy your production facility is? That’s not a relentless focus on prevention, that’s a focus on ignoring food safety protocols.

4) Foodborne pathogens can flock together, like birds of a feather. Say you have a vat of peanut butter, and you test a cup from the top, and it’s fine. Down in the middle of the vat there’s some nice extremely deadly salmonella, but you miss it with your test, because you only scooped from the top, so you send the peanut butter out to be sold. You don’t have bad test results to report, but you do have poison product in the marketplace. And then people start to die. What good would the Reportable Food Registry do in a case like this? And this is a true story, BTW, and called Peanut Butter Corporation of America, the folks who were the peanut butter salmonella poisoners last Fall.

5) Where’s the relentless focus on prevention, again? The Reportable Food Registry is an after-the-fact thing. Often when a producer tests food for pathogens, the food is sent off to market before test results return. That’s why there are so many recalls, because pathogens are discovered after the fact. Reporting bad test results doesn’t even mean it’s going to stop bad food from getting into the food chain.

There are other issues with the Reportable Food Registry, but it’s easier to just say this: How about some real action in food safety? Let’s get that Senate bill passed! Let’s get something President Obama can sign! Let’s focus on first responders! Let’s…let’s…let’s….

Ounce of Prevention

September 14, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Politics

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