Did the Obama administration urge the FDA to revamp food safety standards?
Adding to the chorus seeking an overhaul of the nation’s food safety system, a report issued Wednesday called on the Obama administration to put someone in charge of safeguarding the food supply and to create a Food Safety Administration. The food safety system is “plagued with problems,” said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of Trust for America’s Health, which released the report in conjunction with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Calls for reform of the Food and Drug Administration have only become louder since the salmonella outbreak linked to peanut products late last year. Voluntary product recalls are still being announced; the outbreak has sickened nearly 700 people in 46 states and possibly caused nine deaths. “We are way overdue for a makeover,” said Michelle Larkin, director of the foundation’s Public Health Team. “It costs us around $44 billion annually in medical care and lost productivity, so the stakes are really high.” Michael Taylor, a former FDA deputy and a profe
President Barack Obama has ordered the country’s food-safety regulatory agencies to revamp how they work together and to find ways to detect food contamination more quickly after the nationwide salmonella outbreak that had its roots in Georgia. “I’ve directed both the Department of Agriculture and Health and Human Services to work to come up with a plan, so that a lot of these different agencies that have some jurisdiction over food safety are integrated in a much more effective way, and [so] things aren’t falling through the cracks,” Obama said in an interview Wednesday at the White House with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] Obama also hinted that he’ll soon announce major changes at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that may improve food safety regulations and give the FDA more power to regulate the toba
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