posted on July 24, 2007 11:00:09 AM new
(Page 1 of 2)WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 26, 2007
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FDA consumer safety officers Dean Cook, left, and Matthew M. Henciak inspect spices at the port of Baltimore in 2000. The FDA has cut the number of inspections to half the levels of three years ago. (AP Photo/FDA)
Quote
"People who worked in the Bush administration are coming out and saying the agency is not working at its current resource levels. It just can't manage the job."
Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety,
Center for Science in the Public Interest
(AP) The federal agency that's been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.
The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite a barrage of high-profile food recalls.
"We have a food safety crisis on the horizon," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.
Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.
That's not all that's dropping at the FDA in terms of food safety. The analysis also shows:
There are 12 percent fewer FDA employees in field offices who concentrate on food issues.
Safety tests for U.S.-produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency's own statistics.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FDA, at the urging of Congress, increased the number of food inspectors and inspections amid fears that the nation's food system was vulnerable to terrorists. Inspectors and inspections spiked in 2003, but now both have fallen enough to erase the gains.
"The only difference is now it's worse, because there are more inspections to do — more facilities — and more food coming into America, which requires more inspections," said Tommy Thompson, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services pushed to increase the numbers. He's now part of a coalition lobbying to turn around several years of stagnant spending.
The Bush administration's budget request for 2008 includes an additional $10.6 million for food safety at the FDA; the lobbying group said 10 times that increase is needed. Even though the FDA increased its overall spending on food between 2003 and 2006, those increases failed to keep pace with rising personnel costs.
"It's not just outsiders like us who have been watching it for a while. People who worked in the Bush administration are coming out and saying the agency is not working at its current resource levels. It just can't manage the job," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group.
Members of Congress also have renewed the focus on the safety of the nation's food supply amid highly publicized recalls sparked by food poisoning, including last year when E. coli was found to taint fresh spinach sold coast to coast. That outbreak killed three people and sickened nearly 200.
posted on July 24, 2007 05:50:41 PM new
"And you totally irrelevant point is what craw?"
Because it puts the administration down for not increasing the budget more. To craw, that makes any C&P relevant, whether it discusses the thread topic, or not.
posted on July 24, 2007 11:56:04 PM new
"If only" linduh? Yup, you'd love having less posters who prove your lies .
Sounds like I have you scared
And etex loves bringing up dead presidents whether they have anything to do with the thread or not....gosh he loves irrelevant dead guys!!!
[ edited by mingotree on Jul 24, 2007 11:57 PM ]
posted on July 25, 2007 08:24:08 AM newMy results said: Not Bad! That was with a score of only 6 out of 12.
Must have been a Republican that came up with the result sayings. Only a Republican would think scoring 50% on a test is not bad. If that was a score on a test in high school or college, you would have failed.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
