Durbin Calls for Food Safety Improvements in Wake of Recent Recalls

Press Release

Durbin Calls for Food Safety Improvements in Wake of Recent Recalls

With July 4th barbeques around the corner, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) visited the Joliet Junior College Culinary Arts Program to discuss his legislative proposal to strengthen the nation's food safety system.

The federal agencies charged with safeguarding the U.S. food supply have come under fire recently in the wake of nationwide recalls and quarantines of tainted pork, spinach, peanut butter and pet food. "The product recalls that we have seen in the past few months - first with pet food and then with food intended for human consumption - have shown us that food-borne illness is a real threat in this country," Durbin said.

Durbin also wants to hold the Chinese government and their exporters accountable for sending contaminated products into the U.S. for sale. In the last several months contaminated toothpaste, vitamin c, monkfish, and pet food have been discovered. "‘Made in China' is rapidly becoming a warning label for American consumers," said Durbin. "We need something better than a food safety system that operates on a case by case basis. We need to hold the Chinese government and their exporters accountable for sending contaminated products to the U.S."

Durbin said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that as many as 76 million people suffer from food poisoning each year. Of those individuals, approximately 325,000 will be hospitalized, and more than 5,000 will die. Children and the elderly are especially vulnerable to food-borne pathogens. With emerging pathogens, a population at high risk for food-borne illnesses and an increasing volume of food imports, this situation is unlikely to improve without decisive action, Durbin said.

Durbin has been pushing since 1997 for a single food safety agency with the authority to protect the food supply based on sound scientific principles. Currently, there are at least 12 different federal agencies and 35 different laws governing food safety. With overlapping jurisdictions, federal agencies often lack accountability on food safety-related issues. For example, processed food facilities may be inspected by the FDA once every five or six years, while meat and poultry operations are inspected daily by USDA.

"The recent contaminations point to serious, but correctable, weaknesses in our food safety system" Durbin said. "Quick action is needed at the federal level. Today, we have 12 different federal agencies stumbling over each other to ensure the safety of our food supply. Turf battles, overlap and inconsistencies are inevitable.

Durbin's legislation, the Safe Food Act, is designed to ensure the safety of our nation's food supply by making one federal agency responsible for food safety monitoring and would:

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Require food producers to code their products so that those products can be quickly traced in the event of a food-borne illness outbreak
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Require that food processing plants have procedures in place to prevent and reduce food contamination
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Require regular inspection of domestic food facilities with frequency based on risk
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Give the FDA recall authority. If the food safety system is centralized in one agency (the FDA), the agency could quickly respond to an outbreak.

The Senate unanimously approved a Durbin amendment in May to give the FDA the following new responsibilities:

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Establishing an early warning and notification system for human food as well as pet food products. The legislation directs the FDA to work with professional organizations, veterinarians, and others to disseminate information about pet food contamination and in cases of both pet and human food, to keep up to date, comprehensive, searchable recall lists on their website.

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Improving FDA's ability to detect problems, and alert consumers of contaminants by creating an adulterated food registry for imported and domestically produced food. The amendment requires the FDA to establish a registry to collect information on cases of potentially dangerous food adulteration to improve risk-based surveillance of food safety and improve the speed at which consumers and firms are notified. Importers and domestic processors and manufactures of food would have to submit information pertaining to actual or suspected adulteration of food. The submission would be made to the FDA for inclusion in a centralized database through an electronic portal. The sources of the recent human and pet food contamination were wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate that originated in China. Neither shipment was inspected by FDA; in fact, FDA inspects fewer than 1.5% of imports. A database would give FDA better information on which to base inspections.

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Requiring companies to maintain records and make them accessible to FDA as part of an investigation. This provision would prevent delays that could keep contaminations from being traced as quickly as possible. In the case of the recalled peanut butter this past winter, an FDA report showed that inspectors were denied documents when they requested them. The bill would clarify that when FDA conducts inspections, it will have timely access to those documents needed to safeguard the food supply.

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Establishing uniform federal standards and better labeling of pet food. The guidances and practices that today govern the pet food industry are implemented on a voluntary basis by manufacturers and state departments of agriculture. However, there is no requirement for states to adopt these practices and they don't have the force of federal guidelines. Inspections are not coordinated state to state and some states have different standards than others.

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