Food safety act a start, but needs to be stronger

By Michael Thomas

Every two hours a U.S. resident dies from a food-related illness. Every year, nearly one in three Americans — including some 3.2 million Georgians, myself among them — becomes seriously ill from food they thought was safe to eat, and some 325,000 wind up in the hospital.

These startling statistics, and the recent highly publicized outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli found in Food and Drug Administration-regulated foods such as peanuts, spinach, sprouts and other products, have led Congress to push forward the Food Safety and Enhancement Act of 2009.

The White House also showed its concern about food safety this month when its Food Safety Working Group released its first set of recommendations calling for much-needed reform.

Despite the obvious need for meaningful reform, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 calls for high-risk food facilities to be inspected only once every six to 12 months and gives only weak mandatory recall power to the FDA for all of the foods that they regulate.

While the bill is a step in the right direction, it falls far short of measures needed to protect Americans from avoidable illness and death.

We continue to rely on a 1940s food safety system to regulate a 21st-century food supply. I know what it means to suffer from a food-borne illness and mine is one of millions of such stories.

I loved to eat peanut butter so much that my father called me in February 2007 when he saw news of a peanut butter recall.

Unfortunately, it was too late. I had already eaten some of the salmonella-tainted peanut butter and woke up the next day suffering from dry heaves, diarrhea and other symptoms.

At age 50, I went from someone who hadn’t been sick a day in my life — in fact, so healthy that I didn’t think I needed health insurance — to someone who spent the coming weeks in and out of the emergency room.

Except for the elderly, salmonella symptoms typically clear up after a few weeks. Instead, mine grew worse.

Since the initial symptoms started, I was diagnosed with Reiter’s syndrome, which involves a host of health problems, including arthritis and conjunctivitis, and damage to my heart lining, eyes, intestines, shoulders and arms.

I spent nearly six months bedridden in the house I now share with my son’s family, who continues to help care for me. Because I lacked insurance at the time of my illness — and am now uninsurable — I spent tens of thousands on medical bills and subsequently lost my house.

As bad as this is, it could have been even worse.

My daughter-in-law and infant granddaughter also contracted salmonella poisoning from peanut butter.

Thankfully, they recovered. I’m living proof that food-borne illness not only has terrible health consequences for those who eat bad food, but also impacts entire families and support systems.

As an advocate for food safety and a member of Safe Tables Our Priority, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing illness and death from food-borne pathogens, I urge our Georgia members of Congress to strengthen the Food Safety Act so that fewer Americans will be subjected to the ordeal that I went through.

Here’s how:

First, high-risk food facilities regulated by the FDA must be inspected at least monthly, and plants that slaughter and/or process meat products must be inspected continuously as they do at the USDA.

Second, FDA inspections must be thorough to ensure that companies are in compliance with strict performance standards. This means the bill must require the FDA to rank hazards in the foods they regulate and set performance standards based on microbial testing.

Third, the bill needs to require that company test results revealing contamination be promptly reported to the FDA.

This is not what currently occurs, as is evident by the recent salmonella outbreak from Peanut Corporation of America products.

PCA continued to ship potentially deadly food into the marketplace despite repeatedly finding contamination.

Fourth, enforcement takes money, and this means that the facility registration fees stipulated in the current legislation must be raised to ensure that consumers are protected.

Finally, Congress should block any attempts by food industry lobbyists to eliminate civil penalties for violations under the act. The ability to impose tough penalties will protect consumers by serving as a deterrent to potential food safety violators.

We all want our tax dollars to be used to protect our families from harm — and that includes harmful foods.

It is not acceptable for FDA-regulated foods to receive such low federal funding levels and such little inspection.

I want my congressional representatives to correct this — starting with a far stronger Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009.

Michael Thomas, a member of Safe Tables Our Priority, lives in Stone Mountain.