In the face of a nationwide scare involving contaminated eggs, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner said Monday the agency needs more resources to hunt down the sources of contaminated food and hold commercial farmers and others accountable.
“We need additional resources, we need additional authority,” said FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg. “We need to be able to more routinely review records.”
But the call for more federal authority resulted in a strong response from the commercial food industry.
Dr. Hamburg’s statement “that the FDA hasn’t had enough authority to help prevent outbreaks like the current contaminated eggs is incorrect,” said Deborah Stockton, executive director of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association. “The FDA has not acted fully on the authority they have. They could have been inspecting those farms once a month, once a week, once a day.”
Ms. Stockton added that, “instead of asking for support to do the job they are already authorized to do, [FDA officials] are demanding more authority to create more layers of bureaucracy that will increase the problem instead of solving it and destroy small farms in the process.”
Dr. Hamburg’s call for more government authority to “hold companies accountable” came on the 10th day of a massive egg recall to stop a salmonella outbreak that has sickened roughly 1,300 Americans.
Federal investigators think the source is contaminated eggs - as many as a half-billion - from two Iowa farms.
The recall could widen over the coming days and weeks as federal investigators probe the egg distribution network, Dr. Hamburg said on NBC’s “Today” show.
She used a series of network interviews Monday morning to urge Senate passage of legislation that would increase federal inspections and give the FDA authority to order recalls. The House has passed food-safety legislation, and the recall could prompt the Senate to vote soon after the August recess, Democratic and Republican staffers said.
The Senate bill gained bipartisan support after Democrats agreed to remove a ban on using the chemical Bisphenol A in food and beverage containers and also to reduce the regulatory burden on small farmers.
Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said GOP senators will wait until after the recess to see “whether there is a move to extend federal regulatory authority beyond the pending legislation.”
In addition to strengthening federal authority over commercially distributed food, the legislation would require the FDA to charge food factories, warehouses and other establishments fees for reinspections.
The Congressional Budget Office projects the cost of implementing the legislation would be $1.4 billion from 2011 to 2015.
Ms. Stockton said the Senate bill would put at risk the future of small farms.
The bill will “serve only to further industrialize farms,” she said. “For true food safety, farms need to be small, unregulated, and as many as possible selling directly to the final consumer, restaurants and grocers where accountability is built into the transaction.”
The United Egg Producer group declined to comment on Dr. Hamburg’s statements, but released a statement about the outbreak and on what might follow in Congress.
“It is wrong to jump to any conclusions about the source of the current recall of eggs because the FDA says it will be at least one week before they can pinpoint the source of the contamination,” said group spokesman Mitch Head. “It is irresponsible for anyone to try to capitalize on these consumers’ illnesses to push their own political agenda.”
Salmonella usually causes fever, stomach aches and diarrhea, but can be fatal to some people, including those with a weak immune system.
Dr. Hamburg also addressed questions about whether the FDA was slow to respond to contamination outbreaks, saying the agency was trying to prevent such outbreaks before they happened.
“We very much want to shift the paradigm to a preventive approach,” she said.
The two Iowa farms linked to the disease outbreak - Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms - have some of the same chicken and feed suppliers and connections to an Iowa business with a history of violating state and federal laws. FDA officials said last week they had “no inspectional history” with Wright County Egg.
An egg industry spokeswoman said Quality Egg supplies young chickens and feed to Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms. The two share other suppliers, she said without naming them.
Businessman Austin DeCoster owns Wright County Egg and Quality Egg. Wright County Egg recalled 380 million eggs Aug. 13 after it was linked to more than 1,000 cases of salmonella poisoning. A week later, Hillandale Farms recalled 170 million eggs.
c This article was based in part on wire service reports.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.