Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009

Floor Speech

FOOD SAFETY ENHANCEMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (House of Representatives - July 30, 2009)

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Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about? What is it about?

Food-borne illness in the United States of America kills 5,000 people every single year.

We went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan when 3,000 people, unbeknownst that when they went to work that day that they weren't coming home, and we went to war in Afghanistan as a result.

We know that 5,000 people every year die of a food-borne illness and an illness, my friends, that can be prevented.

Stand with the mother and the father of a 2-year-old child, the parents who went to the grocery store and brought home spinach or lettuce or sprouts or tomatoes and their child died because of E.coli. Stand with the son and daughter of an elderly person in a nursing home who ate a peanut-based product and wound up dying because of that, having survived illness. That's what this bill is all about.

We can prevent food-borne illness in the United States of America. We can prevent 5,000 deaths every year. That's what this bill is focused on. It is of critical importance. It is about the health and the safety of American families. That health and safety is not only threatened in airports and border checkpoints or harbor containers. It's in fridges, on kitchen tables.

And for too long the cornerstone of our food safety system, the FDA, has only rudimentary, ancient tools and an outdated mandate at its disposal. This bill rectifies that oversight. It gives the FDA the means to deal with the dangers that are posed by our global food system. It enhances the agency's ability to stem microbial illnesses, prevent contamination before it happens.

It looks at risk-based inspection and says, what are the foods that are at highest risk? Let's set up some performance standards to deal with that. Let's put mechanisms in place so that we can trace the contamination and make sure we find it and find it quickly, protect the public health, and, yes, protect industry as well. That was part of this effort as well.

Performance standards are the backbone for monitoring an effective process and a control system. I would urge the FDA to develop testing protocols for each performance standard that it sets. This would include ongoing industry testing programs, supported by periodic sampling by the FDA.

Thank you. We have an opportunity. The laws and the statutes at the Food and Drug Administration today are inadequate to protect the food and the safety of the American people and at the very same time they put at risk the industries that deal with these products. The industry has come forward and said, Give us standards. That's what this bill is all about.

We have an obligation today to pass this bill and to make sure that we say to the American people we are doing everything that we can to prevent 5,000 deaths every single year and particularly the most vulnerable, our children and the elderly.

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