Investing in food safety saves lives

By Michael Doyle

The last things we want to worry about over the holidays are food safety hazards, such as salmonella or E. coli in poultry, eggs, meat or peanut products, fruits and vegetables.

Every year, about 70 million Americans suffer some sort of food-borne illness, with an estimated 300,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.

Early in November, almost 300,000 eggs were recalled because they came from a barn in Ohio where salmonella was found. During the past few years, recalled foods have ranged from ground beef to cookie dough and even the ultimate comfort food — peanut butter — and the proverbially nourishing spinach. The public understands the urgency of the problem. In a recent survey commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trusts, nine of 10 Americans favored stronger food safety laws.

As serious as the problem is, Congress continues to grapple with comprehensive food safety legislation. Despite a bipartisan vote in the Senate, it’s unclear whether Congress will clear the bill before they depart for the holidays. That’s only the latest in a long list of disappointments. Alarmingly, there were no major food safety gains from 2006 through 2009, according to a report released last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture is stepping up the stringency of its regulation of poultry plants, the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the remaining 80 percent of the industry, inspects the average food-processing plant only about once every 10 1/2 years.

In the past, most foods were harvested, processed and consumed locally. Now, the industry is global, with more than 2 million farms and hundreds of thousands of food processing plants, grocery stores and restaurants in the U.S. alone. Food can be contaminated anywhere, from rice paddies and packinghouses far away to pans and plates in our own homes.

While Congress delays taking action, important work is being done at the nation’s land grant universities. Agricultural researchers are exploring ways to eliminate harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins and chemical contaminants.

Here at the University of Georgia, our team of food scientists and technologists are developing antimicrobial treatments that will reduce salmonella and E. coli populations on fresh fruits and vegetables and in poultry. We also are addressing the challenge posed by the human norovirus that is the leading cause of food-borne illness in this country, resulting in an estimated 9 million illnesses annually. Land grant universities also provide training in food safety for farmers and plant managers.

But such essential education and research is chronically underfunded. While the federal budget will be trimmed, Congress should not wield its scalpel on agricultural research, already cut to the bone.

Since 2005, funding levels remained at about $2.1 billion. Because of budgetary constraints, the USDA has reported that its Agricultural Food and Research Initiative was forced to reject 84 percent of the meritorious research proposals it received in 2006 and 78 percent in 2007.

For the health of our economy as well as our families, the nation needs to step up food safety education and enforcement so that we can restore confidence in agriculture and food service industries.

Agriculture is a $131.769 billion industry, with more than 820,000 jobs. Meanwhile, food service is one of the nation’s fastest-growing industries, with 8 million jobs nationally. Maintaining public confidence in these sectors is especially essential since so many other major industries have been devastated by the recession.

Michael Doyle is the director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety.