From an article at HealthNewsTrack.com regarding the FDA’s progress on food safety issues:
In 2007, FDA began working in collaboration with the State Health and Agriculture departments in Virginia and Florida, several universities, and the produce industry on a multi-year Tomato Safety Initiative. As part of the initiative, FDA has led assessments of grower practices focusing on the factors believed to be associated with contamination of tomatoes with Salmonella. FDA has conducted assessments in Virginia and began assessments in Florida in April.
Sooooo – how’s that going?
In other FDA news, the transcript from the blink-and-you-missed-it “all day public meeting” regarding pet food standards is available for download in pdf format. It doesn’t take too long to read because you can skim over all the good ol’ boy chatter and cut straight to the only voice we consumers had at the meeting: Mike Floyd from Defend Our Pets. (Take their survey on pet food safety here.) His comments are straight talk on what consumers want and need from the pet food industry. Thank goodness he was there because after he spoke, the FDA shut down this supposed all day public meeting citing lack of attendance. Well FDA, some of us actually have to work for a living and can’t necessarily get an entire weekday off. So to my mind it’s certainly plausible that some people were planning to attend your all day public meeting – you know, when they could get there, which may have been more than 90 minutes after the meeting started – which is when you closed the thing down. So while the FDA touts this as a community outreach activity, I would describe it as a business-as-usual-activity.
Newsflash: We’re going to have to do a lot better to fix the problems in our food safety system. For humans and pets. Because the status quo ain’t workin’.