July 9, 2008
Editorial
When 1,000 People Get Sick
The government officials who are supposed to protect America’s food supply are not certain what has made almost 1,000 people ill in the last three months. At first it was raw tomatoes that appeared to be tainted with a rare form of salmonella. So, consumers avoided tomatoes, and the tomato business suffered mightily. Health officials are still worried about tomatoes, but they’ve also raised concerns about jalapeño peppers. Or perhaps cilantro. Or maybe some brands of salsa. Somewhere. Meanwhile, people keep getting sick.
This failure is an urgent reminder that the country needs an effective system to track food from the farm to the table. If health officials could find tainted items and quickly trace them back to their tainted source, it would save consumers their health and businesses profits.
After last year’s problems with contaminated peanut butter, spinach and imported seafood, Congress and the White House pledged to take swift action to ensure the safety of the nation’s food.
Both houses of Congress are still working on food-safety bills, and the Food and Drug Administration — understaffed and ill equipped — unveiled a food-safety plan in November but has yet to implement it. There can be no more delay. The F.D.A. commissioner, Andrew von Eschenbach, should use his emergency powers now to impose new rules to improve food safety.
Last week, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Consumer Federation of America called on Dr. von Eschenbach to use his authority to require the food industry to put in place a detailed tracking system to follow produce from farm to fork. This is a good idea.
Some food producers already track their products. Others could add information to the stickers already on many fruits and vegetables to identify where they are grown and how they are distributed. Those stickers could act as tiny tracking documents allowing investigators to see quickly how the nation’s produce moves from field to final destination.
The consumer organizations also called for another promising idea — that each producer or processor create a detailed and written safety plan to help the F.D.A. identify and prevent such problems as contaminated water or lack of proper sanitation facilities for workers.
If the cluelessness about this latest salmonella outbreak offers one lesson, it is that health officials need to know exactly where the nation’s fruits and vegetables have been. And they need to know it before even more people fall ill.
