Panel Presses Congress on Need for ‘Food-Safety Czar’

The United States needs a “food safety czar” to take charge of a crazy-quilt system that falls short of ensuring sound scientific protection against food-borne illness, an independent research panel told Congress on Thursday.

The National Academy of Sciences panel also recommended updating turn-of-the-century laws on meat and poultry inspection, raising standards for imported fruits and vegetables and replacing 35 major federal food statutes with a single national food law based on scientific principles.

Food industry spokesmen were cool to the idea of putting one powerful official in charge of issues now handled by more than 12 separate agencies. And the Clinton administration said it is already improving the science behind food safety.

“In essence, you are creating a brand new federal bureaucracy,” said Brian Sansoni, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America. He said the group agrees, however, with the panel’s call for scrapping archaic food laws.

But consumer advocates predicted that the czar proposal would become the focus of debate in Congress.

The academy is a prestigious, nonprofit organization chartered by Congress to provide technical advice on matters of national importance. The panel stopped short of recommending the creation of a single food safety agency, though many members support that idea.

Academic studies have estimated that contaminated food causes up to 80 million cases of illness a year in the U.S. and kills up to 9,000 people. These estimates have been challenged as much too high, but the hard data that would settle the dispute simply do not exist.

Whatever the numbers, the panel noted that lifestyle, diet and population changes have increased some risks to Americans.

People eat more restaurant meals, more raw fruits and vegetables and more imported food. Elderly people, many of whom are less able to withstand illnesses, account for a bigger share of the population.

The panel concluded that the current food safety system provides an “acceptable” level of protection--but that it could be much better.

“You are not going to go out to lunch and die from it,” said panel member Marsha Cohen, a law professor at UC San Francisco. “But even a small risk can create a significant amount of harm . . . because everyone has to eat.”

A hypothetical “surf n’ turf” dinner helps illustrate the problems of fragmented oversight and dated inspection practices:

Under a 1906 law, the carcasses the steak came from must be visually inspected by Agriculture Department inspectors, as all meat and poultry are. The idea was to keep already-dead and diseased animals from being turned into food for humans. But microbes cannot be detected by looking at a dead steer.

The government’s new science-based system for preventing bacterial contamination has not yet been extended to all meat processing plants.

The Food and Drug Administration would be responsible for the safety of most of the other foods in the hypothetical dinner.

Except for the shrimp. On seafood, FDA shares jurisdiction with the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service, which runs a voluntary inspection program.

Unlike the Agriculture Department, FDA does not have on-site inspectors at farms, processing plants and other points in the food delivery chain.

If the French fries in the dinner were commercially produced, chances are the plant would be inspected by the FDA once in a decade.

“We have inspectors who make periodic checks on [produce processing] but maybe not enough because too many are watching cows,” Cohen said.

Turning to salads and vegetables, the regulatory puzzle gets more complicated.

U.S. growers have to abide by laws that restrict pesticides and contaminants. Foreign growers do not. The Agriculture Department has authority to require that imported meats are produced according to U.S. standards, but FDA does not have parallel authority to safeguard fruits and vegetables. And only a tiny proportion of imported produce is inspected.

If wine is imbibed with the meal, there is another regulatory switch. The Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is responsible for making sure that it is free of harmful additives.

Finally, should the diner get sick from the meal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might take an interest.

If divided authority and outdated laws are not confusing enough, the National Academy panel also concluded that the current system acts as a barrier to safety improvement.

For example, the FDA has approved irradiation to kill microbes on food. But to use the process on meat and poultry, the current system must abide by separate Agriculture Department rules. Panel members said that would lead to time-consuming delay.

Consumer activist Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the bottom line is that the system does not give taxpayers their money’s worth.

“We have many hazards in the food supply that aren’t being addressed,” she said. “We are paying for a system that isn’t as good as it should be in preventing hazards from showing up on our dinner table.”