The Office of Inspector General (IG) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued a report that “identified significant weaknesses in FDA’s [the Food and Drug Administration’s] oversight” of its contracts for state inspections of food facilities. In recent years, FDA has increasingly shifted to the states its responsibility for conducting inspections, and has apparently “failed to ensure [in eight states] that the required number of inspections was completed,” “did not ensure that all State inspections were properly classified and that all violations were remedied,” and “failed to complete the required number of audits for one-third of the States and did not always follow up on systemic problems identified.” Based on an analysis of FDA inspection data and interviews with agency officials, the report, titled “Vulnerabilities in FDA’s Oversight of State Food Facility Inspections,” opens by noting that annually “128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3,000 die after…
Category Archives Issue 421
Eight U.S. Senators have urged the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “publicly and vigorously” defend the safety of Gulf seafood in the wake of last year’s oil spill. Led by Senator David Vitter (R-La.), the lawmakers signed a December 1, 2011, letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg asserting that although “rigorous testing” has revealed that Gulf seafood is safe for human consumption, many consumers believe otherwise because of “misinformation and unscientific claims.” Vitter wrote a similar letter to Hamburg in November. The effort was prompted by opposing claims made by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), whose scientists assert that FDA’s safety thresholds for Gulf seafood “significantly” underestimate cancer risks from seafood contaminants. NRDC published a study in Environmental Health Perspectives concluding that “FDA risk assessment methods should be updated to better reflect current risk assessment practices and to protect vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and children.”
Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has introduced a package of bills that would require foods with genetically engineered (GE) ingredients to provide that information on product labels (H.R. 3553); affect how GE pharmaceutical and industrial crops are grown, while establishing a tracking system from cultivation to disposal (H.R. 3554); and protect farmers and ranchers from economic harm purportedly caused by GE seeds, plants or animals (H.R. 3555). Introduced on December 2, 2011, the bills were referred to a number of committees; the co-sponsors are mainly Democrats, although Republican Representative Don Young (Alaska) signed onto the “Genetically Engineered Food Right to Know Act.” In a December 9 statement, Kucinich referred to examples of cross-contamination, stating “We must take steps to prevent genetically engineered organisms from being grown in a way that could do irreversible damage to our food supply. Under pressure from profit-minded industry, we have already allowed the spread of genetically…
Denying an employer’s motions for summary judgment in an employment discrimination suit, a federal court in Louisiana has determined that severe obesity, regardless of its basis, qualifies as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. EEOC v. Res. for Human Dev., Inc., No. 10-03322 (E.D. La., decided December 7, 2011). The court did not decide whether the employer had terminated the obese employee’s employment because she was regarded as disabled, finding that the matter presented a genuine issue of fact to be decided by a jury. The employee, now deceased, weighed more than 400 pounds when she was hired by the defendant, which owned and operated a long-term residential treatment facility for chemically dependent women and their children. Some eight years later, the employee was terminated from her position; at the time, she weighed 527 pounds. She filed a discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging…
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