Bipartisan Senate Bill Takes Aim at Food Safety
U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) have introduced the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), which would expand and strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) authority to address the safety of the nation’s food supply. The proposal, which has reportedly attracted the support of industry and consumer groups alike, would increase the frequency of food plant inspections, expand FDA’s access to records, give the agency the authority to recall tainted food products, and require the creation of a national strategy to protect the food supply from terrorist threats and intentional contamination.
Originally introduced in July 2008 with many of the same sponsors, the bill would require all food facilities to have HACCP plans in effect and allow the FDA to suspend the registration of any food facility that “has a reasonable probability of causing serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals.” It would also give the agency access to records in a food emergency and require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish a pilot project “to test and evaluate new methods for rapidly and effectively tracking/tracing fruits and vegetables in the event of a food-borne illness outbreak.”
From the Senate floor, Senator Durbin reportedly commented, “When I introduced this bill in the last Congress, we were in the middle of one of the largest food-borne illness outbreaks in the history of our country. Nearly 1,500 people fell sick last spring and summer because of Salmonella Saintpaul . . . Less than a year later, we find ourselves in the middle of yet another nationwide outbreak; peanut butter tainted with Salmonella, the second case of its kind in two years . . . It is clear that the Food and Drug Administration, who regulates these foods and 80 percent of our food supply, including virtually all food imports, cannot keep up. The agency is underfunded and overwhelmed.”
Unlike proposed legislation introduced earlier in the year by Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), this bill focuses on revamping the 1938 law that created the FDA rather than establishing a stand-alone food safety agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. See U.S. Food Law Report and meatingplace.com, March 4, 2009.
In other legislative developments, Representative Pete Sessions (R-Texas) has introduced a resolution (H. Res. 202) to express the sense of the House that FDA’s commissioner should evaluate the scientific evidence as to whether to add more folic acid to enriched grain products and expand folic acid fortification requirements to cornmeal and corn-based food products. See CQ Bill Track, March 3, 2009.
