Food Safety Rapid Response Act of 2009
Floor Speech
FOOD SAFETY RAPID RESPONSE ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - June 23, 2009)
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I am proud to stand here today with Mr. Chambliss, the Senator from Georgia, in speaking out in favor of our bill to bring food safety to this country. It is interesting that we introduced this bill together because, of course, this latest outbreak that got so much attention nationally with the Peanut Corporation of America started in Georgia. No one knew that at the time as people got sick across the country, and it ended in Minnesota where, after three deaths in my State, it was the Minnesota Department of Health and the University of Minnesota working together that once again solved the problem, figuring out where the salmonella was coming from.
Today a Republican Senator from Georgia and a Democratic Senator from Minnesota have come together to introduce this bill to say we want to do everything we can to prevent this from happening in the first place. That is why we both support the FDA bill. But it is also to say, when it does happen, we want to catch things as soon as possible so we have less people who get sick, less people who die, and a lot of that has to do with best practices. I am proud to stand with the Senator from Georgia today.
This past week, our country saw another food recall due to the outbreak of E. coli caused by refrigerated cookie dough manufactured by Nestle. The outbreak has sickened at least 65 people in 29 States, and it is the latest in a series of foodborne outbreaks in the last 2 years, or at the least, the outbreaks we know of since many cases of foodborne illness are never reported or those that are reported are never linked to an identifiable common source.
In the spring and summer of 2007, as you may recall, hundreds of people across the country were getting sick from salmonella. The source was ultimately traced to jalapeno peppers imported from Mexico.
Last fall, hundreds of people, as we just talked about, across the country again fell ill to salmonella. Again, this was traced back to the peanut butter processing plant in Georgia. In the meantime, nine people died from salmonella poisoning, three of them in my home State of Minnesota.
In both of these outbreaks, more than half of the people who got sick or died did so before there was any consumer advisory or recall. Half of these people got sick or died before there was a consumer advisory or recall. In the case of the jalapeno peppers, people had been getting sick for almost 2 months before the advisory was issued about tomatoes, the original suspect, which turned out to be incorrect, hurting that industry. It was nearly 3 months before the first illness was reported in Minnesota, and then, once again, solved in Minnesota.
In the case of the peanut butter, people were getting sick for 3 months before the first illness was reported in my home State. For 3 months people got sick all across the country, and it was only when they got sick or died in Minnesota that it got solved.
We have to fix this situation. I am proud of my State. I am proud it was able to catch these two major food outbreaks. But we have to be doing it in other places as well.
The breakthrough in identifying the sources of contamination did not come from the Centers for Disease Control, despite their good work. It did not come from the Food and Drug Administration. It did not come from the National Institutes of Health. The breakthrough came from the work of the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, as well as a collaborative effort with the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. This initiative has earned a remarkable national reputation.
With all due respect to their exemplary work, the Nation should not have to wait until someone from Minnesota gets sick or dies from tainted food before there is an effective national response to investigate and identify the causes. The problem is that the responsibility to investigate potential foodborne diseases rests largely with local and State health departments, and that is OK, if it worked everywhere the way it does in Minnesota. There is tremendous variation from State to State in terms of the priority and the resources they dedicate to this responsibility.
In Minnesota, it is a high priority, and we have dedicated professionals who have developed sophisticated procedures for detecting, investigating, and tracking cases of foodborne illnesses.
The peanut butter salmonella outbreak was so extensive and so shocking that it has finally put food safety on the agenda in Washington. It is a crowed agenda, as we all know, but food safety must be there.
In March, I joined with a bipartisan group of Senators to introduce the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, which would overhaul the Federal Government's food safety system. Other cosponsors are Senators Dick Durbin, Judd Gregg, Ted Kennedy, Richard Burr, Chris Dodd, Lamar Alexander, and Saxby Chambliss.
This legislation is a comprehensive approach to strengthening the Food and Drug Administration's authority and resources. But I believe there is still much more that can and should be done. That is why, along with Senator Chambliss, I have introduced the Food Safety Rapid Response Act. This legislation focuses on the Centers for Disease Control, as well as State and local capabilities, for responding to foodborne illness.
It has three main provisions.
First, it would direct the Centers for Disease Control to enhance foodborne surveillance systems to improve the collection, analysis, reporting, and usefulness of data on foodborne systems. This includes better sharing of information among Federal, State, and local agencies, as well as with the food industry and the public. It also includes developing improved epidemiology tools and procedures to better detect foodborne disease clusters and improve tracebacks to identify the contaminated food products.
I can tell you, our State is proud to be the home of Hormel, Schwan's, Land O'Lakes, General Mills, and many other food processing companies, and they are eager to help because oftentimes they know the best way to trace back these foodborne illnesses. They want to have safe food and they are interested in helping.
Second, it would direct the Centers for Disease Control to work with State level agencies to improve foodborne illness surveillance. This includes providing support to State laboratories and agencies for outbreak investigations with needed specialty expertise. It also includes--and this is key--developing model practices at the State and local levels for responding to foodborne illnesses and outbreaks.
This is about the Minnesota model, these best practices. What happens in Minnesota, I will tell you--and I will bet it is as expensive in some other States, but what we do is smart. We take a team of graduate students--sort of food detectives--and they work together. Instead of having it go all over the State to a county nurse in one county and someone else in another county, this group of graduate students, working under the supervision of doctors and people who are professionals in this area, literally calls all at once. They work next to each other and they call people who have been sick or who are sick and that way, at one moment in time, they are able to immediately figure out what the people were eating and where the food came from. There are sophisticated laboratory techniques that go on everywhere, but what works here is this teamwork with graduate students.
Finally, this legislation would establish Food Safety Centers of Excellence. The goal is to set up regional food safety centers at select public health departments and higher education institutions. These collaborations would provide increased resources, training, and coordination for State and local officials so that other States can be doing exactly what Minnesota does. In particular, they would seek to distribute food safety best practices such as those that have become routine in my State.
Dr. Osterholm, at the University of Minnesota, is a national food safety and disease expert. Many of you may have seen him featured nationally with the latest H1N1 flu outbreak. He is credited with the creation of the Minnesota program. He has said that the creation of regional programs modeled on Minnesota would go a long way to providing precisely the real-time support for outbreak investigations at the State and local levels that is so sorely needed.
No one believes we are going to be able to do this all out of Washington. That is why we simply have to upgrade the places that our States are using, so when there is an outbreak we don't have to wait for people to get sick or die in Minnesota to solve these problems.
The recent outbreaks have shaken our confidence and trust in the food we eat. According to the Centers for Disease Control, foodborne disease causes about 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. Yet for every foodborne illness that is reported, it is estimated that as many as 40 more illnesses are not reported or confirmed by a lab.
The annual cost of medical care, lost productivity, and premature deaths due to foodborne illnesses is estimated to be $44 billion. So there is a lot at stake, both in terms of life and money. I believe we can do so much better. I believe it because I have seen it in my State.
Senator Chambliss, from the State of Georgia, where this latest outbreak occurred, believes it because he has seen the devastation to an industry's own State, where when you have one bad actor and then it gets out there and more people get sick and die, it doesn't help anyone in this country. The tragedy of so many families--three in my own State--hurts tremendously. So we know we can do better, and that is why we are introducing this bill on a bipartisan basis.
As a former prosecutor, I have always believed the first responsibility of government is to protect its citizens. When people get sick or die from contaminated food, the government must take aggressive and immediate action. I believe that together the Food Safety Rapid Response Act and the Food Safety Modernization Act will strengthen food safety in America and ultimately save both lives and money.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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