Foodstuffs Often Contaminated; Obama Signs Historic Food Modernization Act Today

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Main Category: Nutrition / Diet
Also Included In: Public Health;  Regulatory Affairs / Drug Approvals
Article Date: 04 Jan 2011 - 8:00 PDT


President Barak Obama will sign into law the FDA Food Modernization Act today in an attempt to cap a problem in which much of the foodstuffs in American homes are unhealthy due to the lack of funding and empowerment of the FDA to do more through investigations of food plants, and the ability to swiftly implement recalls when necessary.

Georges C. Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP (E), executive director of APHA states:

"The public health community celebrates this tremendous step forward in protecting U.S. families from food borne illnesses, which affect millions of Americans every year. We thank the president and Congress for making food safety a public health priority in this country."

The APHA aims to protect all Americans and their communities from preventable, serious health threats and strives to assure community-based health promotion and disease prevention activities and preventive health services are universally accessible in the United States.

Passage of food safety modernization legislation has long been a priority for APHA. Each year, food borne illness strikes 48 million Americans, hospitalizing a hundred thousand and killing thousands. The President and members of Congress have finally recognized that the burden that food borne illness places on the American people is too great and action needed to be taken.

The idea of prevention is not new. FDA has established prevention-oriented standards and rules for seafood, juice, and eggs, as has the U.S. Department of Agriculture for meat and poultry, and many in the food industry have pioneered best practices for prevention. What is new is the recognition that, for all the strengths of the American food system, a breakdown at any point on the farm-to-table spectrum can cause catastrophic harm to the health of consumers and great disruption and economic loss to the food industry.

The seemingly long overdue food safety bill aims to improve the capacity and coordination of federal, state and local government agencies, which are primarily responsible for the prevention, detection and response to all outbreaks. It will protect the health of all families by establishing a comprehensive plan to improve the safety of the nation's food. Additionally, the measure would offer grants to enhance education, training and technical assistance to help agencies comply with the new requirements.

Processors of all types of food will now be required to evaluate the hazards in their operations, implement and monitor effective measures to prevent contamination, and have a plan in place to take any corrective actions that are necessary. Also, the FDA will have much more effective enforcement tools for ensuring those plans are adequate and properly implemented, including mandatory recall authority when needed to swiftly remove contaminated food from the market.

The FDA will also for the first time have a congressional mandate for risk-based inspection of food processing facilities. For example, all high-risk domestic facilities must be inspected within five years of enactment and no less than every three years thereafter.

The legislation significantly enhances FDA's ability to oversee the millions of food products coming into the United States from other countries each year.

Benjamin continues:

"We owe this victory to the countless public health advocates across the country and the food safety champions in Congress who all demonstrated unwavering determination to enact this bill."

APHA is a member of the Make Our Food Safe coalition, an alliance of public health organizations, consumer organizations and groups representing the families of victims of food borne illness.

For more about APHA, visit www.apha.org.

Written by Sy Kraft, B.A.
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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