Contaminated spinach, suspicious green onions, E. coli-laden lettuce — it seems like green vegetables are the newest threat to America.
Turns out there may be a reason: the Food and Drug Administration, charged with ensuring the country’s food safety, hasn’t gotten the funding to do the basic studies it needs to draft appropriate regulations. From today’s Baltimore Sun:
Recurring outbreaks of food-borne illness from contaminated produce are “unacceptable” in today’s society, the government says. But the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t done much of the basic research that would let it write regulations to fix the problem.
Six years after the FDA first issued general guidance to the produce industry on how it might prevent contamination from microbes such as E. coli 0157:H7, experts say federal regulators still can’t answer key questions. . . .
Without such specifics, FDA talk of regulations to protect consumers from more outbreaks like the recent ones involving fresh spinach and Taco Bell restaurants could be little more than bureaucratic saber-rattling. . . .
In a business-friendly administration, many new regulatory efforts advance slowly, if at all. But the FDA’s predicament is more acute because an agencywide budget squeeze is putting disproportionate pressure on its foods program. . . .
An internal budget analysis prepared this summer, “FDA Financial Realities,” concluded that the FDA’s food program budget would need $176 million more in 2007 to provide roughly the same level of service as it did in 2003.
