Independent voices from the TWT Communities
The nasty form of E. coli hitting Europe points out gaps in the U.S. food safety system that raise concern that similar outbreaks might happen here.
Surely they were two of the more acerbic-tongued men ever to grace American public life - President Harry S. Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson. Forget that they were an unlikely pair: Truman, a small-town Missouri boy and a failed haberdasher whose formal education had ended at high school; Acheson, a to-the-manor-born son of an Episcopal bishop, educated at Groton and Yale, a Washington superlawyer before and after public service.
Shrimp, catfish and other seafood farmed in China will be banned immediately from entering the U.S. because they contain harmful chemicals, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday.
"FDA was going on its own track, DHS was on its track, and no one was talking to each other," said David Acheson, who was then FDA's assistant commissioner and is now a food industry consultant.
"We, in the U.S., reacted many times appropriately to solid epidemiology without actually having a positive sample, like spinach in 2006, which was obviously a massive E. coli outbreak," he said.
