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FDA Touts Efforts to Enhance Food Safety According to an article on the Forbes.com website, the FDA released the report last week, which detailed its efforts to protect consumers. One of the most important changes was the FDA’s work building better relationship with state and local health departments. “Another big success is the strategic change we are making with regard to imports. What you could call the ‘globalization of FDA,’ which is shifting our emphasis on inspection on the port of entry only to more of a product-lifecycle approach,” Dr. David Acheson, assistant commissioner for food protection at the FDA, told the publication. “We are focused on building the systems to better understand what's going on in foreign manufacturing.” What else does the FDA say it has done? The report cites increased inspection overseas, hiring an “international notification office” to work with other countries, developing tests to detect contaminants, and inspecting almost 6,000 food establishments in the past year. But the article says some critics think the FDA’s work doesn’t go far enough. “We were not a huge fan of some of the goals they laid out, so we are not a huge fan of the progress they’ve made,” Patty Lovera, assistant director of the consumer watchdog group Food & Water Watch, told the publication. “They are too reliant on the industry. They are really collaborating with the industry — there is really not new regulation. There is not an overall commitment to enforcement domestically or abroad. This whole plan they are reporting progress on, we think is a step in the wrong direction.” To read the full article, click here: http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2008/12/01/hscout621874.html
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