Eating strawberries, papayas and sprouts should make us feel good and healthy. Instead, some people have faced sickness and even death from them.
This summer an E. coli strain from strawberries sickened nine people and killed one in Oregon, whereas papayas and sprouts infected hundreds with salmonella in over five states.
But why this surge in sickness when the landmark food safety law was passed by Congress last December? This motion was supposed to reduce the frequency and severity of food safety problems, but the latest news shows that it is not working.
The Food and Drug Administration’s deputy commissioner for foods, Mike Taylor, says that “It is an enormous undertaking.” Taylor is responsible for turning the law into a coherent set of rules that farmers, food processors and importers can follow to keep us safe.
Because of recent budget cuts, the FDA simply does not have the fiscal resources that are required for such a job. While they were hoping to get more money, the recent plunge in the stock market has left the food regulators with little hope of acquiring additional funds, and they have instead been left with less money than they initially asked for.
Instead, the FDA is trying to focus on food that has the greatest safety risk, exempting farms that average less than $500,000 a year in sales, selling mostly to local vendors.
Taylor estimates that the FDA will need hundreds of millions of dollars to finance these new regulations, and with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, it’s not likely that they’re going to get it.
Until then, we have to be careful to wash our produce as well as we can, and if you know that you have a suppressed immune system, it might be best to boil everything you get fresh.
