Every Year 25 Percent of Americans, 33 Percent of Canadians Get Sick
from What They Eat
- Protection of Food Supply Faces Problems
Every Year, 25 Percent of Americans Become Sick From Food; FDA
Fighting to Increase Power Unchanged Since Great Depression
By Bill Whitaker
CBS Evening News, Jan 9, 2009
Straight to the Source
[Editor's Note: It seems problematic to
say that the "U.S. has one of the safest food supplies in the
world," while 25 percent of Americans get sick from the food
they eat every year! For more information, check out OCA's
Food Safety Resource Center.]
When it comes to agriculture, America is indeed the land of
plenty. Foods raised here and imported from around the world
provide greater abundance and choice than ever before. But while
our foods are bountiful, they're also inconsistently regulated.
The U.S. has one of the safest food supplies in the world, but
the report card is mixed, reports CBS News Correspondent Bill
Whitaker. Every year 33 percent of Canadians get sick from what
they eat. In the U.S., it's 25 percent. But in England it's only
2 percent and in France just 1 percent. In both places food is
grown more locally and on a smaller scale than in North America.
For part of the CBS News series "Where America Stands," a recent
poll found that just one in three Americans are very confident
that the food they buy is safe although the vast majority are at
least somewhat confident that their food is safe.
Special Report: "Where America Stands"
Safety always comes first in 12-year-old Rylee Gustafson's
kitchen.
"I need to wash my hands I touched my jeans," Gustafson said
in her Henderson, Nev., home recently.
She, more than anyone, knows that even good food can hurt you.
In 2006, on her 9th birthday, she ate a spinach salad and was
infected with a virulent strain of e-coli.
"It felt like killer pain, and my organs started to shut down,"
Gustafson told Whitaker.
Kathleen Chrismer, Rylee's mother, told Whitaker that she
panicked when she didn't know what was hurting her daughter.
"You really didn't think you were going to pull through?"
Whitaker asked Gustafson.
"I really felt that bad," she said.
She spent 35 days in the hospital on dialysis. Today she's still wary
of fresh fruits and vegetables and has a damaged heart, kidney and vocal
chords.
The Problem
Her story is just one example of the problem of food safety. Over the
last few years, widespread outbreaks in spinach, tomatoes, peppers and
peanut products sickened thousands and killed nearly a dozen Americans.
Every year there are 76 million cases of foodborne illness in the United
States, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.
Today Americans consume more fresh produce, increasingly from imports
from around the world. But imported produce is inspected even less than
home-grown harvests.
"Ninety-nine percent of the food that you're buying at the grocery store
that comes from foreign coutnries has not been inspected by the FDA,"
said Erik Olson, director of food and consumer product safety at the Pew
Charitable Trusts.
Olson says the Food and Drug Administration is simply not up to the
task. The FDA is responsible for 80 percent of the food supply, which is
everything but meat and poultry.
The number of food producers under FDA jurisdiction has increased, but
the number of inspections is going down. Between 2001 and 2007, the
number of domestic food producers increased from 51,000 to 65,500. At
the same time, the number of producers inspected fell from 14,721 to
14,566, according to the Government Accountability Office.
"They simply do not have the tools to really protect our food supply,"
Olson told Whitaker.
The Solution
So, what's the solution? To start with, more and more farmers are
creating their own rules.
Jack Vessey represents the fourth generation in his family to farm
his land in Holtville,
Calif., 8,000 acres of leafy greens. After the 2006 spinach
outbreak, likely caused by unsanitary field conditions, he joined a
farming cooperative -
the California
Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement - which agreed to a set of
voluntary standards in the field for irrigation, fertilization and
sanitation, including hairnets, gloves and frequent hand-washing.
Vessey hired a food safety manager and estimates the extra cost to keep
his fields contamination-free is about $250,000 a year, but another
e-coli outbreak could cost farmers billions in lost sales.
"We know that for us we do the best we can to provide a safe, reliable
food supply then we're going to spend the money," Vessey told Whitaker.
The California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement has become a model for
other states and other produce such as tomatoes. The cooperative sends
out state inspectors for frequent, even monthly, audits.
"We're focused on it; we have these inspectors out here, and they're
really making us do the right thing," Vessey told Whitaker.
Another part of the solution? Science, cutting edge research around the
country to find how pathogens make it onto fresh produce and how to
lessen that risk. At the
Center for Produce Safety
on the University of California-Davis campus, Linda Harris is focusing
her research on irrigation.
"It's hard to prove, it's hard to measure, but I really think we do make
a difference," Harris told Whitaker.
Yet another part of the solution lies in Washington. Legislation, which
could be considered as soon as next month, could change the FDA's
100-year-old mandate. It hasn't been updated since the Great Depression.
"We are hamstrung," Mike Taylor, a senior adviser to the FDA's
commissioner, told Whitaker. "We often find ourselves as a result in a
reactive mode."
The proposed changes include giving the FDA the ability to recall foods,
which it can't do now, access to farm and factory records, more
inspectors and more funding to back it up.
"Things that will make food safer, not just regulation for regulation's
sake," Taylor described the proposed legislation to Whitaker.
Gustafson traveled to Washington to share her story with members of
Congress. She'll probably need a kidney transplant when she's a
teenager. Until then, she just wants to see this bill pass.
"I would love to see that so people don't have to take the risk,"
Gustafson told Whitaker. "They know that it's probably not gonna
have a bacteria that's gonna kill you or your child."
Having safe food, she says, is not too much to ask.
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