Recent spate of food scares has China on edge

Imported food can sometimes arrive with danger
Imported food can sometimes arrive with danger
By Deb Kollars, Jim Downing and Dorsey Griffith
McClatchy Newspapers
4/29/07

Recent spate of food scares has China on edge

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - With food coming in from all corners of the earth, the simple, necessary, daily act of eating in America has become not just an exercise in the delicious, but also the awe-inspiring:

Peaches in the dead of winter. Golden curries from Asia. Cookies that stay fresh for months. Powders that turn a morning smoothie into fuel for a marathoner.

But the global dinner plate also comes with dangers, as has been painfully demonstrated in the recent scare from the discovery of the industrial chemical melamine in pet food - and now, with experts warning it may have spread to the human food chain.

"This whole debacle where you've got a plastic getting into a food supply shines a huge spotlight on a broken, broken system," said Elisa Odabashian, director of food safety for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports.

According to consumer and food safety experts, a vast array of foods and ingredients pours into the United States every year with little or no scrutiny. Much of the food comes from countries with less stringent regulations on pesticides, processing and sanitation.

In the past, grapes from Chile, raspberries from Guatemala and onions from Mexico have sickened or even led to the deaths of consumers.

In recent days consumers learned that pet food contaminated with the melamine was fed to hogs destined for market.

The revelations pushed worries over imported foods and ingredients to a new level and forced consumers to ask troubling questions about aspects of the food supply they may have taken for granted:

Who's making all the ingredients and additives going into food these days? What's going into products whose names we often can't even pronounce? Who's keeping an eye on safety?

Only about 1 percent of food from other countries undergoes inspection at U.S. points of entry. Often, reviews include little more than a paperwork check.

"The big red strawberries in the middle of gloomy January are very pretty," Odabashian said. "But they're very likely being produced in countries with far less regulation than what we have here."

For years, the United States exported more food than it imported. Recently that balance shifted. In 2006, the nation exported $62.6 billion in food items and imported $75.1 billion from 175 countries, a jump of more than 60 percent in the last decade, according to inflation-adjusted trade data from the U.S. Agriculture Department's Foreign Agricultural Service.

The bulk of what Americans eat still is produced in this country. About 15 percent comes from other countries, said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. For some categories imports run higher, he noted. For example, 80 percent of seafood, 50 percent of tree nuts and 45 percent of fruits eaten in this country come from elsewhere.

In addition, a growing portion of foods processed here contain ingredients of foreign origin, with China an emerging major supplier.

How much arrives from abroad is anyone's guess. Currently, seafood is the only food required to carry a label showing the country of origin.

Packages of processed foods must only list where the "final transformation" of the product took place, according to Allen Matthys, a regulatory specialist at the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

Food companies must keep records on their ingredient suppliers, but they don't have to disclose that information to the public - or even the government - unless regulators suspect public health is at risk, said Benjamin England, an attorney who worked at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 17 years.

The nation's food inspection system is disjointed and inadequate, consumer and food safety experts said. Recent U.S. outbreaks of E. coli from contaminated spinach and salmonella from tainted peanut butter illustrate the need for a stronger food safety network, they said.

The FDA has jurisdiction over 80 percent of food produced in this country, including seafood, fresh produce and processed foods.

Yet it has only several hundred inspectors for at least 60,000 food processing plants across the nation, Doyle said. In contrast, the USDA, which oversees meat and poultry, has 7,600 inspectors for 7,000 U.S. plants.

When it comes to imports, the inspection picture is even worse.

The FDA is charged with assuring the safety of roughly 17 million product shipments each year, about two-thirds of them food. The volume has more than tripled since 1999, while the nation's inspection force has remained static in size. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government created new food safety measures, but it has followed through on few.

Under agency targets, about 1 percent of import shipments are supposed to get a close look from FDA officials. Such inspections can range from simply reviewing paperwork to actually sending a product to a lab for testing, England said.

Inspecting the food coming into this country is a worthwhile effort, FDA records show.

In March, FDA inspectors rejected 1,526 shipments - mostly food but also drugs and medical devices - from 75 countries.

China had 215 rejected shipments and India 279. A shipment of "Chilli" powder from Bangladesh was ruled "to consist in whole or in part of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food."

The problems aren't limited to Asian exporters. A load of smoked salmon from Norway tested positive for Listeria, an often-lethal bacteria.

Many food contamination problems come from unsanitary or faulty processing.

But last week's revelation about melamine and related chemicals turning up in two commonly used protein ingredients - wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate - raised a different specter: deliberate contamination. Federal officials are investigating whether the proteins were spiked with the chemicals to make them appear to have higher protein content.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer group in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday called for a ban on imports of wheat gluten, rice protein and other grain products from China until the FDA can certify their safety.

"This is a warning sign our system is really vulnerable," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the center.

Protein sources are so widely sprinkled across Americans' diets in products with long shelf lives that it would be impossible to do an effective recall if the human food supply got contaminated, DeWaal said.

In an unprecedented move, the FDA announced last week it would start testing imports of six proteins that are used not only in pet foods, but in breads, baby formulas, protein bars, and a huge array of other foods.

Targeted proteins are mostly used to make foods more nutritionally functional and appealing to consumers.

A creamier soup, a sturdier meatless sausage, a more nutritious baby formula - all can be achieved with ingredients made from soy, wheat or corn.

With constant pressure to cut costs, U.S. food companies increasingly turn to foreign suppliers for lower priced soy, corn and wheat protein ingredients.

"It's cheaper, and some places do an excellent job of marketing," Rushing said.

Consumer watchdogs believe labels should carry more information about where ingredients originate. But some industry experts said it would be impractical to do so.

"The label would be as long as your arm," said Daniel Fabricant, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Natural Products Association in Washington, D.C.

FDA plan to close field labs draws fire
FDA plan to close field labs draws fire
By Tony Pugh
McClatchy Newspapers
5/3/07

WASHINGTON - A Food and Drug Administration plan to close seven of 13 field laboratories has angered some lawmakers, government workers and safety advocates, who fear the move will chase away skilled veteran employees and hurt the FDA's ability to respond to public health emergencies.

The FDA's field labs inspect and analyze food, drugs, animal medications and feeds, medical devices and other health products.

The labs check for compliance with federal guidelines, protect consumers from unsafe, ineffective and mislabeled products, and help investigate public health threats such as product tampering, bio-terrorism, food-borne illnesses and contaminated blood supplies.

Several of the facilities helped investigate the recent pet food scare and E. coli and salmonella outbreaks in spinach and peanut butter. On the heels of these crises, the proposed lab closings have been met with strong suspicion.

"In the middle of all these outbreaks and contamination issues, the timing of the proposal is extraordinarily bad," said Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America.

Over the next several years, the FDA wants to close labs in Philadelphia; Denver; Detroit; Alameda, Calif.; Lenexa, Kan.; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Winchester, Mass. Those operations and an estimated 250 employees would then be moved to five multi-purpose "mega-labs" that could handle all types of FDA testing.

The multi-purpose labs are in Atlanta; Jamaica, N.Y.; Jefferson, Ark.; Irvine, Calif.; and Bothell, Wash. A forensic chemistry lab in Cincinnati wouldn't be affected.

Most of the buildings slated for closure are older facilities, needing major renovations or complete replacement, said Diana Kolaitis, director of field operations at the FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs. Most have expiring leases and aren't suited for expansion. The current roster of FDA labs occupy 500,000 square feet, but only 300,000 are being used.

"So all the (staff at) the labs that have been recommended for closure could easily fit into the remaining laboratories," Kolaitis said. Downsizing also would make investment in new lab equipment easier.

But some fear that fewer labs would delay the testing of food, biological medical products or drugs in the event of a public health emergency.

Kolaitis said proximity to the labs isn't a concern because testing samples could be sent to any facility by overnight mail. She noted that a network of state laboratories also is ready to assist in any food-related emergency.

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents about 150,000 government workers in more than 30 agencies, said most FDA employees wouldn't be willing to relocate to new lab locations.

"They'll simply go out into industry and get jobs in locations where they are today, and their experience and skill will be lost to the FDA," Kelley said.

To accommodate those employees who don't want to move, Kolaitis said the FDA intends to re-assign them to other jobs in their current locations and possibly use them to train their replacements at the new locations.

Waldrop of the consumer federation was unconvinced.

"If they're keeping people on and re-assigning them, they're still paying that person's salary, plus the new person you have to put in the lab, so where does that money come from in an agency that's strapped for cash?"

The FDA plan has faced skepticism in part because it was being implemented without input from Congress. Kolaitis said she now expects congressional hearings on the matter after more than 50 members of Congress asked the agency to halt the plan until it could be reviewed.

The plan was first revealed in December by an agency employee who leaked an internal e-mail on the proposal to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit advocacy and service organization.

Similar plans have been floated at the FDA since the mid-1980s, and the agency decided in 1994 to go from 18 labs to 13. But a report by the Government Accountability Office determined that while the 1994 downsizing "could yield efficiencies, we found that the documentation and estimates of the benefits resulting from consolidation are questionable."

Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, said the FDA has again failed to explain how the proposed lab closings would improve the agency.

"If they have a good programmatic reason for doing it that explains why they'll be better at the end of the day, why keep it a secret? Why not lead with it? If they do that, I don't think you'll hear a peep of protest."

The lack of transparency has made lawmakers bristle as well.

In a letter to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the FDA apparently decided to mislead the committee in a Dec. 26 letter that claimed that the restructuring plan hadn't been finalized and that "therefore, there are no changes to (FDA's) current laboratory structure."

Dingell later learned the FDA had disclosed the plan in November to a union that represents affected workers. "The refusal of the FDA to provide Congress with accurate information in response to the request by a Committee Chairman is completely unacceptable," Dingell wrote.

He has asked the FDA to provide all records relating to the plan since January 2005.