NYTimes is reporting “In a major step toward an overhaul of the nation’s food safety system, the House of Representatives passed legislation on Thursday to require more frequent inspections of processing plants and give the government the authority to order the recall of tainted foods.”
Clearly food safety is of prime importance. High risk food processing plants would be inspected every 6- 12 months.
A yearly fee of $500 would be paid by food processing plants.
Heightened inspection requirements on imported foods.
“Over all, the legislation will raise the bar for the entire food industry and provide powerful disincentives” to bad actors, said Scott Faber, vice president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group representing food processors, which supported the bill.
The global sourcing of food poses many challenges. Americans count on the safety of their food. But the question is how fresh and safe is it? The below article states that “Salmonella” bacteria cause 1.3 million illnesses each year including fever, diarrhea and even death. The CDC(Center for Disease Control and Prevention) has found that “Salmonella” is the most common bacterial cause of food borne illness.
President Barack Obama recognizes the importance of food safety to Americans. He has created a Food Safety Working Group to coordinate Federal efforts and develop short- and long-term agendas to make food safer. Below is a summary from the article.
The U.S. Drug and Food Administration presents a robust strategy to protect the nation’s food supply from both unintentional and deliberate attack. One of them being ensuring that food that comes into the country is safe, high quality with nutritional value. Safer food means healthier children, longer lives, less costly healthcare.
On July 1, 2009, the Working Group submitted its general principles to the President mentioned below.
Principle 1: Preventing harm to consumers is our first priority: Too often in the past, the food safety system has focused on reacting to problems rather than preventing harm in the first place. The Working Group recommends that food regulators shift towards prioritizing prevention and move aggressively to implement sensible measures designed to prevent problems before they occur. Key to this approach is setting rigorous standards for food safety and providing regulatory agencies the tools necessary to ensure that the food industry meets these standards.
Principle 2: Effective food safety inspections and enforcement depend upon good data and analysis .High-quality information will help leading agencies know which foods are at risk; which solutions should be put into place; and who should be responsible. The Working Group recommends that the Federal government prioritize crucial inspection and enforcement activity across the world; support safety efforts by States, localities and businesses at home; and utilize data to guide these efforts and evaluate their outcomes.
Principle 3: Outbreaks of foodborne illness should be identified quickly and stopped. The Working Group recommends the establishment of a food tracing system that shortens the time between outbreak detection, resolution, and recovery. It is in everyone’s interest for outbreaks to be rare in number, limited in scale, and short in duration.
The global sourcing of food poses many challenges – one of them being ensuring that food that comes into the country is safe and of high quality. Here is a two posts/articles which highlight the complexity to implement food safety guidelines.
According to Debra Harrison – chief consultant at Harrison Consulting -
“Many growers and processors find programmes required by industry guidelines and customer requirements overwhelming. We specialize in working with them to set up systems that will be easy to use while meeting consumer and industry expectations”
With rising consumer demand – US law allows any of the other 152 countries that belong to the WTO to apply to export meat to the US. Apart from regulation, laws and standards – which are all required – there needs to be a simple device – which can be used by both the suppliers and the consumers. That’s where EFresh(R) device can help at several check points in the food chain. We invite you to explore the advantages and technology behind EFresh(R).
Each year, 76 million Americans are sickened from consuming contaminated food and 5,000 of these people die.
The continued occurrence of these incidents are not randoms or some unpreventable happenings but due to some serious problems with our food safety system.The contamination over the last several years is most frequently seen in frozen food which are blatantly labeled as fresh.
Here is a nice flash which illustrates the food America imports. The data was taken from usnews.com. We need to make sure food coming into USA is safe and of high quality. EFresh(R) is a device which can help several Government agencies and Import companies. Enjoy.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7adc8105-d761-4216-8c71-c21bedb12f07)