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Subscribe to RSSThe Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed the most sweeping food safety rules in decades, requiring farmers and food companies to be more vigilant in the wake of deadly outbreaks in peanuts, cantaloupe and leafy greens.
The long-overdue regulations are aimed at reducing the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.
"We're taking a big step for food safety by proposing the standards that will help us prevent food safety problems rather than just reacting to them," said Michael Taylor, FDA deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.
The FDA's proposed rules would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.
Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in some of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.
In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at the Colorado farm where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout a New Mexico peanut processing plant and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.
Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems and how they would correct them.
"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said FDA's Taylor.
The new rules come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.
In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are often eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.
None of the proposed regulations would take effect until after a 120-day comment period. The FDA also is giving the farmers ample time beyond that to comply. Larger farms wouldn't be regulated for more than two years; smaller farms would have even more time.
The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.
Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.
"These proposed regulations are a sign of progress," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who has been a critic of the FDA. "The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place."
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
Related:
- Salmonella outbreak in mangoes grows
- Salmonella in cantaloupes sickens 141
- Who is behind that outbreak? Sometimes the CDC won't say
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It is somewhat amazing the number of years it takes for a government agency to implement and enforce what amounts to common sense.......
yet glad they have. Backers of Big Farm (haha like big Pharma...huge factory farms) probably paid off by lobbiests vote against these measures saying they are "bad for business" and evoking the mom and pop family farm
Glad the admin pushed this through though i agree dissapointing that it wasn't implemented.
Long over due and much needed!
"... keep animals out of the fields"??? This makes absolutely no sense. What the FDA really needs to do is put more emphasis on cleaning up CAFOs (concentrated Animal Feed Operations).
it makes sense
these aren't mom and pop farms largely
think how farms are operated right now
think of feed lots
the animal density is unhealthy for animals...it probably is unhealthy for the vegetables we eat also
I am sure since researchers and scientists back this bill that they knew what they were doing when the put this provision in. I am just speculating myself.
We don't have enough data to conclude what you do difinitively..only that on face value it seems curious
I know they've traced back sources of contamination that later killled people. I am sure they have their reasons
I don't suppose this means they will take another look at GM salmon ("frankenfish") before giving the final OK?
No? Thought not.
Unless everything is grown in a filtered air environment, irradiated and grown underground in a salt mine..it's gonna get dirty. Keep birds from flying over every field in America..yeah..that's practical and would work. Wash your darn food folks..and don't buy the stuff tat is constantly being reported as contaminated..I haven't eaten cantalope or peanuts in months and will not starve if I do not. Quit being such sheep and eating what the media tells you is good for you or bad for you..do research and make informed choices for you and your families on your own. Read the label..look up the additives, wash your hands..get real.
no one is keeping birds from flying over fields
they were storing already harvested peanuts uncovered...why not cover them?
Keeping animals out of fields..my guess they mean farm animals (reminder many farms are factory farms and the animal density is high, health is low) not the occasional burroring vole or bird overhead
Great job Obama! Now we will save 2000 or 3000 people to live in an already greatly over populated planet.I bet none of these idiots who propose these bills, has ever travelled to other countries,including Europe.We spend more time,energy and money, in America, making sure everything is safe for everyone,only to find a few more people to save.When I was a child,everyone, in all of my various schools, ate peanuts and no one ever got sick or died.All of a sudden,peanuts can be as deadly as radiation in a room.You can't get or bring on board an airplane,a peanut.Someone in the plane might have a super allergy to peanuts and it might kill him.Or he could choked on the deadly crackers they serve you.Or hit his head in the toilet,half way fall down and bang his head on the faucet and die.We have become insane in America.The same birds that flew over the peanuts in this article will be placed on the endangered species list in 3 years becasue they are dropping like flies from lack of food.Then the farmers will be required to set out a percentage of their peanuts to insure the survival of the birds.The price of peanuts will triple in 1 year.We are doomed.Ten thousand years from now,when they are excuvating American ruins,all they will find are countless books of regulations that made it through whatever disaster befells us!
if your toddler...or your sister or brother's...died from eating contaminated spinach you'd be singing a different tune
hopefully you'd want to prevent it from happening to others. I am sure you'd wished you could have prevented the death of your sweet innocent little family member
acceptable losses.....
FDA approves the sale of cigarettes to white trash - smoking must be healthy!
bobs............get a life and a brain transplant..............FDA does not regulate cigarettes!!!!!! Know what ATF stands for??
ATF = Addictions, Tobacco & Firearms
Actually FDA has tried to regulate TObacco but congress keeps getting in the way - Tobacco Industry doesn't want FDA involved because they don't want to have to add all the health labeling etc.
While over the long run this might map to a bit of progress, it is vastly disturbing to read that everything occurs in phases over several years, and the reason this is disturbing is that it is the "business as usual" status quo where there are lots of wonderful sounding words but nothing actually changes . . .
Does requiring farm workers to wash their hands and to practice good personal hygiene become such a burden to farmers that it requires several years of gradual enforcement before becoming mandatory?
Is prohibiting fetid standing pools of toxic water and other liquids on food processing plant floors such an inordinate burden on farmers and food processors that it needs to be given special status with respect to looking the other way and ignoring it for several years?
In the case of the peanut processing company in New Mexico that stored raw peanuts uncovered outside where birds could poop on the peanuts, do the people making decisions at this type of company really deserve to be granted the privilege to be allowed to handle and process food?
And the same thing applies to people who do not have sufficient training and common sense to know that food processing equipment left routinely in filthy conditions is a clear and present danger to the health and well-being of people, where the same question applies ("Why do these people deserve to be granted licenses and to be allowed to handle and process food?") . . .
It all sounds good when you read it in a news report, but all the caveats and exceptions make it a bit absurd when all the proposed improvements are so basic and necessary that they already should be happening rather than being slated for happening sometime several years in the future with plenty of opportunities for farmers and food processors to delay implementing the new procedures even longer . . .
Consumers have the ability to solve the various problems by doing a bit of homework, where for example if you enjoy peanut butter and do your homework, then you know that Jif® peanut butter is made by a company that does everything the correct way with no exceptions, and as another example if you enjoy cantaloupes, then the dismal reality is that cantaloupes are off the Baldenario Approved for Novices Menu™ until sometime in the far distant future, as are leafy vegetables from late-Spring continuing until late-Fall when production moves from California fields near high-intensity livestock feedlots to the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and perhaps Nevada, where at present there are nearly no high-intensity livestock feedlots and not a lot of insects and wild animals to carry bacteria and viruses from place to place . . .
[NOTE: Regarding leafy vegetables, the restriction refers to enjoying raw (a.k.a., "uncooked") leafy vegetables, typically in fresh salads, since cooked spinach, collard, mustard, and turnip greens, and other leafy vegetables are fine all the time, with the key being to cook the leafy vegetables at a temperature of at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit for no fewer than 10 minutes, where cooking fresh turnip greens maps to boiling them for 30 to 45 minutes with a bit of seasoning and whatever and certainly meets the aforementioned criteria, as does starting with already cooked canned spinach, collard, mustard, and turnip greens . . . ]
Summarizing, the best protection comes from using the marvelous computing device located between your ears when it is kept current with plenty of good and reliably factual information, where it is useful to observe that the real clue found in this news report on planned FDA "major new food safety rules" is the fact that they current system is so screwed up and heavily lobbied that all the FDA can do is make an effort to cause everything to be better several years from now, because some but not all farmers and food processors are such idiots that actually getting them to follow even the most basic and fundamental safe food growing, handling, and processing practices is beyond the current capabilities of the FDA . . .
And this will continue to be the strategy until the Congress and President grant the FDA essentially Draconian authority and power to order farms and food processing facilities to stop production immediately and to issue mandatory systemic recalls on the spot when an FDA inspector observes unsafe practices and conditions, which is the case because the practical perspective is that the basic problem is the direct result of everything being determined by accountants who are the least qualified group of people on this planet to be making decisions involving health and safety . . .
Given the opportunity, which currently is pervasive, accountants will do everything possible to pinch pennies regardless of consequences when the only real and practical consequences essentially are insignificant monetarily, hence the need for the Draconian option, which maps to making everything important to the extent for example that skipping a bit of routine food processing equipment cleaning and sanitizing can map to an FDA inspector ordering a plant shut-down and nation-wide mandatory product recall, which changes the "cost vs. benefit" equation in such a way that even the slowest accountants have no difficulties understanding the fact that failing to follow generally accepted safe food production practices is likely to be so expensive that it is not even on the table for consideration, really . . .
Really! :-o
The FDA is one of, if not the most corrupt governmental agency there is. They are the lobby for agribusiness and the mouthpiece for Monsanto. Look who heads up the FDA and where they come from. When ever they do something that makes sense it is a bait and switch because as they have you looking at contamination of cantaloupes, they are allowing GMO's and genetically modified salmon to get on the shelves. They pocket the money from kickbacks or rebates as they call them and laugh all the way to the bank. They could care less about the health and welfare of the American people!
I would suggest that agribusiness is more into the USDA than FDA. The challenge the FDA has had since 1980's and will continue to have is the lack of enforcment personnel. Pre Ronald Reagan the food industry could expect at least and annual Sanitation and Processing inspection, with the deregulation activity started by RR and the budget cutting to non-essential personel these inspections have significanlty dropped off.
By the way so have the inspections of businesses by DOT, Mine Safety, USDA, OSHA, etc. When it comes to the safety of the American COnsumer or WOrker we are all SOL.
More government interference that will just drive up prices and increase paperwork. America's food supply is and has been among the safest in the world and in history. Don't buy the scaremongering; this is just unelected bureaucrats making a power grab. They won't be happy until you can be fined for failing to document that you washed your hands for dinner.
Actually these new rules were in response to an act of CONGRESS. Last I looked COngress is elected.
Yes they will drive up prices, only because those companies that import swill from China will have to label the name of the country where the swill is from. They'll then sell less, because most people can read, and they'll have to rise prices to stay in business.