[The current list of food recalls is long and growing, with recent recalls including a well-known brand of deli meats, slivered onions served atop a popular hamburger, frozen waffles and bagged organic carrots sold under various brands at supermarkets coast to coast, and ready-to-eat meat and poultry sold both in stores and online. Some food recalls have led to illness, hospitalizations, and deaths, while others were launched before anyone was impacted.
Despite the recent recalls, food safety expert Dr. Donald Schaffner believes that the frequency of outbreaks is not increasing. “I think outbreaks are random events — and sometimes random events are spread apart, and sometimes they come close together,” he said. “I really think it’s just coincidence.”
Schaffner notes that the Food Safety Modernization Act, signed by President Barack Obama in 2011, led to an overall safer food supply by creating more than a dozen new rules governing areas such as good manufacturing practices, agricultural water, sanitary transportation, hazard analysis, and mitigation strategies to protect our food. However, these rules have taken a while to get fully fleshed out, finalized, and implemented.
Another factor leading to more recalls — and possibly the perception of less-safe food — has been progress in the technology used to reveal an outbreak and link information about its potential source. “The CDC is getting better and better at finding outbreaks thanks to advances in whole genome sequencing,” Schaffner said. “It may have been in the past we had outbreaks like this, but we could never link them together, because we didn’t know that all of these different people in all of these different states all got sick around the same time from eating the same food.”
Some recalls don’t have any illnesses associated with them, and outbreaks are different. “When you have an outbreak, you know for sure that these people ate these foods,” Schaffner said. When people first start getting sick, public health experts may not know which food item is the culprit and which pathogen — top suspects include E. coli, listeria, and salmonella — may be to blame.
The US Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture — which share oversight of food safety — have similar recall structures, with Class I, II, and III recalls depending on the severity. Class I recalls “mean a reasonable chance of serious health consequences or death,” Schaffner said.
Recalls can be initiated for reasons not related to pathogens, such as potential allergens or incorrect labels. In many cases, the company in question decides to initiate a recall without being ordered to do so, Schaffner said. The FDA gained the power to order a company to do a recall with the Food Safety Modernization Act, but the agency seldom does so because the overwhelming majority of companies will do a voluntary recall when they find a problem.
Schaffner noted that unlike the FDA, the Food Safety and Inspection Service, or FSIS — the agency within the USDA that oversees the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products — does not have the power to order a company to recall a product. To stay on top of recalls, you can sign up for alerts from the FDA and USDA FSIS, and both agencies list recalls on their respective websites.
Source link