LOS ANGELES, April 23, 2007
U.S. Food Safety Strained By Imports
Billions Of Dollars In Foreign Food Ingredients Enter U.S. Unchecked Every Year
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(AP / CBS)
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"Unless there's a known problem," Nielsen said, "it's going to fly through."
FDA records over the past year reflect that reality:
None of the barred shipments was either of the two tainted ingredients — wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate — that led to nationwide pet food recalls. It took the deaths of cats and dogs this spring to trigger tests that revealed an industrial chemical somehow entered the food chain.
The FDA issued two brief statements in response to interview requests, saying imported food ingredients are treated "basically the same as with any food commodity" entering the United States.
"We use a risk-management approach and any regulated product, including food ingredients, IS a priority to FDA if it poses a public health risk," one statement said. "If a food ingredient were to be identified as risk to public health, we are able to quickly shift resources to handle."
Exporting countries are supposed to help. But governments such as China, where tainted food scandals are common, can have a stunning lack of oversight, said William Hubbard, a top FDA official for 14 years who now advocates for stiffer food safety regulations.
He recounted how one supplier drove a truck over tea leaves to dry them with exhaust, which leached lead into the leaves. That was an unintended consequence of a supplier taking a shortcut. Imagine, Hubbard said, what could be done by someone intent on hurting people.
By late last week, federal officials said they were investigating whether the recalled pet foods may have been intentionally spiked with the industrial chemical melamine to boost their apparent protein content.
Ingredients aren't often blamed for outbreaks of human illness.
One reason is that they may be processed enough that microbes are killed, though as the pet food case shows, chemicals can remain. Another reason is that connections can be elusive: People sickened by casein, for example, might have consumed anything from cheese to a bodybuilding shake.
Even when an ingredient is the suspected culprit, it can be hard to pinpoint.
More than 1,200 children in at least seven states were sickened in 1998 after eating school lunch burritos. Although flour tortillas were identified as the common link, public health officials never determined what was wrong with them.
"Ingredients are more likely to go under the radar screen," said Helen Jensen, an Iowa State University economics professor who studies food safety and international trade.
When they are bad, she said, they present particular problems: They're widely distributed and often used in products with a long shelf life.
When Canadian pet food maker Menu Foods recalled its products last month, they were pulled from shelves nationwide. Three weeks later, the FDA warned that contaminated food may still be circulating.
Last year's list of leading ingredient suppliers reflected the globalized food chain.
While U.S. neighbors Canada and Mexico were first and third, Malaysia was second. Forests in that Asian nation have been replaced by plantations of trees tapped for palm oil, $250 million of which was sent here. China and India were fifth and sixth, just after New Zealand, according to the AP analysis.
The top ingredient category was the catchall "food preparations," followed by industrial-sized blocks of chocolate, cocoa butter, casein and refined palm oil. Some of the imports can be used in non-edible products; wheat gluten, for example, also is used to make biodegradable "sporks," the combination spoon-fork.
FDA officials have said none of the contaminated wheat gluten from China entered the human food chain. That's little comfort to Jeff Kerner.
Kerner read food labels, paid for all-natural ingredients and figured that would keep his Yorkshire terrier healthy. Instead, Pebbles died last month after eating tainted food.
"All of us, I think, fall into that false sense of security that 'Well, if they put it in there, it must be OK,"' he said. "I understand that it's the bottom line, but at what expense?"
© MMVII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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- Don't worry you can bet our communist leaders here in the communist states of america will be eating nice and safe food and that's all that really matters aye comrades....
- Reply to this comment
- If there is a problem with them inspecting all food that enters the country, then we need to stop eating anything that isn't made in our own countries. The problem is that, of course we don't really know if it is made in our country, because they can bring stuff into the country and then it is labeled as being made in this country. So how do we ever know for sure?
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- As we progress to being a Third World Country.....We are being sold out.
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- It is another form of out sourcing. This time we out source our food safety. And no one cares about OUR food safety except US.
Under the Bush administration, I would be willing to bet that the USDA abrogated their responsibility. Check the numbers, I predict a drop in foreign food inspections. - Reply to this comment
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