Who's Watching What We Eat?
An absolutely terrifying piece by Marian Burros in the New York Times about the obviously broken food safety system in the United States. A quote from an anguished mother whose 2 year-old daughter contracted a strain of the E. coli virus from contaminated spinach.
"You live in the United States of America and this isn't going to happen. There is an assumption that everything is going to be OK, that someone must have checked this out, but it is not the case."
In the past year at least three
thousandpeople died and more than a thousand were sickened by contaminated tomatoes, lettuce, peanut butter and spinach. But the recent contamination of pet food, which has killed many animals, seems to have been the last straw.
Let me get this straight. After 3,000 people have died from food-borne illness, the same number who died on September 11, it was dogs and cats dying that is forcing the government to act? Oops.
Of course, we have had a Republican president for the last seven years, which means regulations are seen as evil and voluntary guidelines are seen as the panacea for everything.
Even now the current FDA commissioner, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, sees regulation as anathema: "Guidances are the most powerful because they give us the flexibility to update science. Regulations are more cumbersome."
I'll tell you what's cumbersome. Dealing with the needless loss of 3,000 men, women, and children because bureaucrats have become instruments of idealogues and conservative orthodoxy. These same folks have stood still doing nothing watching people die in the name of a failed policy.
One former FDA commissioner, Dr. David A. Kessler, summed it up this way in testimony before Congress: "Our food safety system is broken."
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4 Comments:
Well said!
A key strategic goal of the USDA (and possibly the FDA) is to ensure sizable revenues from exports of agricultural products. Our lack of a reasonable food safety program has caused significant harm to those export programs. South Korea, Japan and other nations refuse to buy U.S. beef except in small quantities and with many provisions (e.g., no bones).
Marc at 11:25AM on 05/16/07
Actually, the article says that only three people have died in the past year.
"The cause gained momentum in the past year as at least three people died and more than a thousand were sickened by contaminated tomatoes, lettuce, peanut butter and spinach."
Obviously, one life is too many.
nancil at 1:23PM on 05/16/07
the article says that three people died, not three thousand.
thebkk at 1:28PM on 05/16/07
My bad. I should have known that number was wrong. We are correcting it as we speak. My apologies.
Ed Levine at 2:01PM on 05/16/07