There are about 48 million cases of food poisoning in the U.S. each year

Eating a spicy tuna roll shouldn’t make you sick. Nor should eating cantaloupe, cold cuts, peanut butter or onions, all of which were linked to food poisoning that sickened and killed people in the U.S. within the past five years.

Reports last week of a salmonella outbreak, possibly related to sushi, serve as a timely reminder of why the Obama administration must expedite a plan to modernize the country’s food-safety regulations, which haven’t been updated since the Great Depression.

So far, more than 100 people in 19 states have been stricken, all by an unusual strain of the bacteria known as salmonella Barielly. No deaths have been reported. Many of those who fell ill told health officials they had eaten sushi in recent days, though tracing the source of food poisoning is often difficult.

There’s a chance that if sushi were the culprit, the Food Safety and Modernization Act would have prevented it. Passed two years ago with wide bipartisan support, the law is designed to stop food contamination at the source, not simply react to incidences of food-borne illness. The deadline for issuing the rules to implement the law was Jan. 4, pending a review of the regulations by the Office of Management and Budget.

There are about 48 million cases of food poisoning in the U.S. each year and as many as 3,000 deaths. Although the incidence of food poisoning hasn’t increased much, the virulence of individual episodes is on the rise, particularly from fresh produce, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Last year, cantaloupe tainted by Listeria was responsible for 30 deaths, the most lethal case of food poisoning in U.S. history.

Because the country’s food supply is increasingly concentrated among a handful of large producers and distributors, the potential for mass poisonings is growing. Some of the 50,000 food-processing plants in the U.S. go as long as a decade without being inspected.

Food-borne illness costs the U.S. as much as $77 billion a year in medical treatment, lost productivity and reduced sales of products implicated in contamination episodes, according to an analysis by a former FDA economist. The expense of the tainted peanut butter recall and subsequent decline in demand alone cost the industry an estimated $1 billion.

The food industry would prefer that the costs of more vigilant regulation fall to the American taxpayer. But in light of the harm that food poisoning causes to victims, the economy and the industry itself, the Obama administration should press forward with building support for user fees. The food industry should relent and back them. After all, many manufacturers supported the legislation before anyone thought of asking them to pay for making it work.

FDA says not enough people have contracted cancer for them to regulate BPA in canned foods and beverages.

Manufacturers of baby bottles and cups have stopped using polycarbonate containing BPA (bisphenol A)  in response to consumer concerns it may affect children.

Sarah Janssen, a senior scientist at the NRDC, said the FDA’s denial of a ban shows “a major overhaul” of chemical regulation is needed. The Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based advocacy group, said consumers can no longer trust the FDA to protect the health of their families.

“The agency has veered dangerously off course,” Jane Houlihan, the group’s senior vice president for research, said today in a statement. “Pregnant women and new parents should no longer think FDA has their backs.”

Tell the FDA: No BPA in food packaging!

On March 31st, the FDA will decide whether or not to continue allowing bisphenol A (BPA) to be used in food packaging.

While the toxic chemical was recently banned in California from being used in baby bottles and sippy cups, thanks to the lobbying of the American Chemistry Council and other chemical manufacturers BPA continues to be allowed in food and beverage packaging, including the lining in much canned food and soup.

The FDA has the power to finally put a stop to BPA in our food. It needs to stand up to industry pressure and protect us from this dangerous chemical.

Please join me in urging the FDA to ban BPA in food packaging.

Guess What your kids are eating for lunch? Pink Slime (btw usually used for dog food)

Pink slime is a beef-like product created by grinding together connective tissue and beef scraps normally used in dog food, and treated with ammonia hydroxide to kill salmonella and E. coli.

It is "not meat" according to a 35-year veteran USDA microbiologist, and was recently rejected by the likes of McDonalds, Taco Bell and Burger King.²

So it's pretty disturbing that the USDA continues feeding this stuff to kids, and plans to buy seven million pounds of it for school lunches.

In an all too familiar story, despite concerns raised by USDA inspectors and minimal safety inspections, the USDA approval of Beef Products Incorporated's "Lean Beef Trimmings" was pushed through by USDA undersecretary JoAnne Smith, a George H. W. Bush appointee and former president of the National Cattleman's Association.

The USDA allows beef products like hamburgers to contain up to 15% of the ammonia-treated, meat-ish stuff, but inadequate labeling requirements prevent parents from knowing if it's included in the meat being served at their kids' school.

Aside from the lack of nutritional value, pink slime raises a number of health and safety concerns. The New York Times exposed in 2009 that despite being treated with ammonia, three E. coli contaminations and four dozen salmonella contaminations occurred between 2005 and 2009, during which time school lunch officials three times temporarily banned hamburger makers from using pink slime from one facility in Kansas.
Ammonium hydroxide is itself of course harmful to eat, and can potentially turn into ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in homemade explosives.

Kids need nutritious food to be able to learn in school, and many of the tens of millions of kids who rely on school lunches come from low-income families where they are less likely to get a healthy diet. While pink slime is a nutritionally inferior and potentially risky product, the school lunch program saves only three cents more per pound of ground beef by continuing to put this filler in kids' hamburgers.
Over the past few months, numerous fast-food chains have rejected the product and say they no longer use it. School lunch officials should clearly follow suit.

The American Frozen Food Institute, National Meat Association, International Dairy Foods Association and United Fresh Produce Association would like to cause $77.7 bln in food borne illnesses v having safer processing standards....

An Obama administration plan to raise $220 million for food-safety programs through fees on processing plants, warehouses and other facilities. 

The fees are minimal compared with the cost of foodborne illness, which the act seeks to reduce, Doug Karas, a spokesman for the FDA, said in an e-mail. Such illnesses cost $77.7 billion a year, according to a 2012 study cited in the agency’s proposal. That includes medical costs, time off work and the cost of premature death. 

 The Republican Congress rejected including a similar proposal in the Food and Drug Administration’s budget request last year and also ruled out the idea when debating a food-safety law that President Barack Obama signed last year.

Mutant Fish don't require labels in the USA but in Europe they do.....

A coalition of 11 food safety, environmental, consumer and fisheries organizations sent a letter to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) calling for a halt to its approval of a genetically engineered (GE) salmon after learning that the company’s – AquaBounty Technologies, Inc. – research site was contaminated with a new strain of Infectious Salmon Anaemia (ISA), the deadly fish flu that is devastating fish stocks around the world.

“This new information calls into question the reliability of AquaBounty’s data and the validity of its claims that their fish are safe for the environment” said Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety. “The FDA must respond appropriately and conduct their own environmental impact statement that looks at a broad range of environmental risks from these genetically engineered salmon, including the risk of spreading diseases such as ISA and antibiotic use for other diseases.”

AquaBounty has claimed that the company’s process for raising GE fish is safer than traditional aquaculture. However, documents that were revealed last week indicate that their production site was found by Canadian Authorities to have been contaminated in Nov. 2009. This information was hidden from the public and potentially FDA and other Federal agencies consulting on the GE salmon application. ISA is a deadly disease and is classified as a ‘Listed’ disease by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) – alongside diseases such as Anthrax, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Foot and mouth disease, rabies, sheep pox, swine fever, avian influenza, West Nile fever, scrapie, fowl cholera, bovine tuberculosis and myxomatosis.

“Infectious Salmon Anaemia threatens wild fisheries around the world and the communities whose livelihood depend on those fish” said Erich Pica, President of Friends of the Earth US. “ISA infections in Chile cost the industry around two billion dollars. A similar infection in Canada and the U.S. could be the last blow to wild Atlantic salmon populations and bring a collapse in wild salmon fisheries.”

The December 19 letter urged FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to release all health data on AquaBounty’s GE salmon and to suspend any approval actions until all the data is disclosed and the public has an opportunity to review the data. Additionally, the coalition asked the FDA to conduct a full environmental impact statement that includes review of the effect of fish diseases, like ISA, on wild fish populations that might come into contact with the AquaBounty fish. Currently, the FDA has only performed a less comprehensive environmental risk assessment.

fishberries anyone? -- omega 3 with the taste of a strawberry.....

Right now a debate is raging in the United States about Genetically Engineered (GE) ingredients in our food. The biotech industry claims that GE food crops will save the environment and solve the hunger crisis. But a growing number of scientists, doctors and consumers consider them a threat to the planet, and organizations like Christian Aid and the Institute for Food and Development Policy say GE food crops are likely to increase world hunger.



How can you make sense of this tricky subject? Read on to find out the truth behind the genetic engineering myths.


MYTH #1: Genetic engineering is merely an extension of traditional breeding.

REALITY: Genetic engineering is a new technology that has been developed to overcome the limitations of traditional breeding. Traditional breeders have never been capable of crossing fish genes with strawberries. But genetically engineered “fishberries” are already in the field. With genetic engineering, these types of new organisms can be created and released into the environment1. Food and Drug Administration scientists stated that genetic engineering is different from traditional breeding, and so are the risks2. Despite this warning, the FDA continues to assert that GE foods and crops are not different and don’t require special regulations or labels.


MYTH #2: Genetic engineering can make foods better, more nutritious, longer-lasting and better-tasting.

REALITY: The reason for the millions of acres of GE crops grown in this country today has nothing to do with nutrition, flavor or any other consumer benefit. There is little benefit aside from the financial gains reaped by the firms producing GE crops. Nearly all of the GE corn, soy, and cotton grown in the United States has been genetically altered so that it can withstand more pesticides or produce its own.

MYTH #3: GE crops eliminate pesticides and are necessary for environmentally sustainable farming.

REALITY: Farmers who grow GE crops actually use more herbicide, not less. For example, Monsanto created Roundup-Ready (RR) soy, corn and cotton specifically so that farmers would continue to buy Roundup, the company’s best-selling chemical weed killer, which is sold with RR seeds3. Instead of reducing pesticide use, one study of more than 8,000 university-based field trials suggested that farmers who plant RR soy use two to five times more herbicide than non-GE farmers who use integrated weed-control methods. GE crops may be the greatest threat to sustainable agriculture on the planet. Many organic farmers rely on a natural bacterial spray to control certain crop pests. The advent of genetically engineered, insect-resistant crops is likely to lead to insects that are immune to this natural pesticide. When this biological pesticide is rendered ineffective, other farmers will turn to increasingly toxic chemicals to deal with the “superbugs” created by GE crops. Meanwhile, organic farmers will be out of options.

MYTH #4: The Government ensures that genetic engineering is safe for the environment and human health.

REALITY: Neither the FDA4, the Department of Agriculture (USDA)5, nor the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)6 has done any long-term human health or environmental impact studies of GE foods or crops, nor has any mandatory regulation specific to GE food been established. Biotech companies are on the honor system. They have virtually no requirements to show that this new technology is safe. FDA scientists and doctors warned that GE foods could have new and different risks such as hidden allergens, increased plant-toxin levels and the potential to hasten the spread of antibiotic-resistant disease.


MYTH #5: There is no scientific evidence that GE foods harm people or the environment

REALITY: There is no long-term study showing that GE foods or crops are safe, yet the biotech industry and government have allowed our environment and our families to become guinea pigs in these experiments. Doctors around the world have warned that GE foods may cause unexpected health consequences that may take years to develop. Laboratory and field evidence shows that GE crops can harm beneficial insects, damage soils and transfer GE genes in the environment, thereby contaminating neighboring crops and potentially creating uncontrollable weeds.


MYTH #6: GE foods are necessary to feed the developing worlds growing population.

REALITY: In 1998, African scientists at a United Nations conference strongly objected to Monsanto’s promotional GE campaign that used photos of starving African children under the headline “Let the Harvest Begin.” The scientists, who represented many of the nations affected by poverty and hunger, said gene technologies would undermine the nations’ capacities to feed themselves by destroying established diversity, local knowledge and sustainable agricultural systems7. Genetic engineering could actually lead to an increase in hunger and starvation. Biotech companies like Monsanto force growers to sign a ãtechnology use agreementä when growing their patented GE crops which stipulates, among other things, they the farmer can not save the seeds produced from their GE harvest. Half the world’s farmers rely on saved seed to produce food that 1.4 billion people rely on for daily nutrition.
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1 Rissler, Jane and Mellon, Margaret. The Ecological Risks of Engineered Crops (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996, 4-5.)


2 Discovery documents from the lawsuit Alliance for Bio-Integrity et al v Shalala, May 1998. Center for Food Safety, 666 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, Washingotn DC, 202-547-9359.

3 Benbrook, Charles. “Evidence of the Magnitude of the Roundup Ready Soybean Yield Drag from University- Based Varietal Trials in 1998,” Ag BioTech InfoNet Technical Paper Number 1, July 13,1999. http://www.biotech-info.net/herbicide-tolerance.html

4 Statement of James Maryanski, FDA Biotechnology Coordinator, Before the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, October 7, 1999.

5 Sally McCammon, USDA, “Regulating Products of Biotechnology,” Economic Perspectives, US Department of State, vol 4, #4, October 1999.

6 “Genetic Genie: The Premature Commercial Release of Genetically Engineered Bacteria,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, September, 1995. From PEER, 2001 S Street, Washington DC 20009.


7 “Let Nature’s Harvest Continue!” African Counter Statement to Monsanto, at the 5th Extraordinary Session of the FAQ Commission on Genetic Resources, June 12, 1998.


8 Peter Rosset, “Why Genetically Altered Food Won’t Conquer Hunger,” New York Times, September 1, 1999