Showing posts with label Health Food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health Food. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Why Soy Is NOT a Health Food
Monday, February 2, 2009
Peanut Product Recall Took Company Approval
WASHINGTON — Even though federal health officials have begun a criminal investigation into whether the Peanut Corporation of America deliberately sold contaminated products, the government still needed the company’s permission last week before announcing a huge recall of its products.The wording of the recall statement had to be approved by the company before the Food and Drug Administration could publish it under current rules. The agency relies on cooperation from food makers to ensure the safety of the food supply even when those makers are suspected of crimes.
Some Democrats in Congress have vowed to change this by giving the F.D.A. more authority, and the agency’s critics say it is too timid with the power it has.
On Monday, President Obama promised a “complete review of F.D.A. operations.”
“I think that the F.D.A. has not been able to catch some of these things as quickly as I expect them to catch,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on the “Today” show.
The president said Americans should be able to count on the government to keep children, including his daughter, Sasha, 7, safe when they eat peanut butter.
“That’s what Sasha eats for lunch probably three times a week,” Mr. Obama said. “And, you know, I don’t want to have to worry about whether she’s going to get sick as a consequence to having her lunch.”
The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said Friday that Mr. Obama would soon announce a new F.D.A. commissioner and other officials. Mr. Gibbs said they would put in place a “stricter regulatory structure” to prevent breakdowns in food-safety inspections.
Part of the review is sure to examine whether the requirement for the peanut company’s approval caused delays in warnings about its products once public health officials became aware of significant problems at its plant in Blakely, Ga. The warning also covered products from the company’s customers that manufacture food, including Kellogg.
A representative for the peanut company would not comment. Kris Charles, a Kellogg spokeswoman, said “Kellogg acted quickly and recalled potentially impacted products within hours” of the peanut company’s second recall announcement.
Judy Leon, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, refused to comment.
More than 500 people have been sick in the outbreak of salmonella poisoning, and 8 have died. More than 430 product brands have been recalled.
The delays meant Sarah Kirchner of Belle Plaine, Minn., whose two young children became ill from the outbreak, for weeks had no idea how to prevent a recurrence. Her 3-year-old son, Michael, was hospitalized for four days with intense pain in his head, neck and shoulders, she said.
“He had a spinal tap, bone scan, M.R.I. and a CT scan,” Ms. Kirchner said. “I’m still so worried about him.”
Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said she had been asking top food and drug officials for years if they needed authority for ordering mandatory recalls.
But the officials said companies cooperated when recalls were needed.
“They can’t even get a press release out on this stuff without industry approval. It’s just unbelievable,” said Ms. DeLauro, who promised to offer legislation on Wednesday that would split the agency’s food oversight into a separate entity with mandatory recall authority and other powers.
Public health officials pinpointed the Blakely plant as the source of the salmonella outbreak on Jan. 9. The peanut company announced a limited recall on Jan. 13 and expanded it on Jan. 16. The company waited until Jan. 28 before recalling all products made at the plant in 2007 and 2008, even though it had known since 2007 that tests of products showed contamination with salmonella.
Food buyers and some top public health officials say they knew before any public announcement that the company’s products and those of its customers were the likeliest source of the outbreak.
Craig Wilson, an assistant vice president at Costco, said he pulled Kellogg’s Keebler and Austin peanut butter crackers off shelves a day before Kellogg’s first announcement and nearly a week before the Peanut company and Kellogg issued a nationwide recall that covered those cookies.
Mr. Wilson said he could not wait for the F.D.A. to make announcements about food problems that are widely known among food safety officials.
“I don’t want to say that you can’t rely on the F.D.A.,” Mr. Wilson said, “but we certainly can move quicker than they do.”
The F.D.A. can seize a product that it suspects is contaminated, and it can ask a federal judge for authority to recall products if a maker refuses to do so. The agency can also announce that it suspects problems with a product before the company agrees to a recall. But it rarely does any of these.
Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer in Seattle, said the agency had neither the authority nor the courage it needed to keep the food supply safe.
Michael R. Taylor, a former top official at the food agency, said change was needed.
“F.D.A. negotiates communications about recalls with companies,” Mr. Taylor said, “and that sometimes leads to delays. Changing that dynamic when people are getting seriously ill and dying is something that ought to happen.”
Friday, January 30, 2009
New Look at Food Safety After Peanut Tainting
By GARDINER HARRIS and PAM BELLUCK
Christopher Meunier, 7, had not been sick since he was a toddler, but in late November, he suddenly had a high fever and bloody diarrhea and started vomiting.
Christopher Meunier had salmonella poisoning last year. “He was just screaming in pain,” his mother, Gabrielle Meunier, said.
“He was just in screaming pain,” said his mother, Gabrielle Meunier of South Burlington, Vt. “He said, ‘It hurts so bad, I want to die’ — something you don’t expect to hear out of a 7-year-old’s mouth.”
Hospitalized for six days, Christopher had salmonella poisoning, making him one of more than 500 people sickened across the country after eating peanut butter or peanut products made at a Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Ga.
The Food and Drug Administration has charged that the company knowingly shipped contaminated products to some of the largest food makers in the country from a plant that was never designed to make peanut butter safely, causing one of the most extensive food recalls in history. The company responded that it disagreed with some of the agency’s findings and that it had “taken extraordinary measures to identify and recall all products that have been identified as presenting a potential risk.”
Food scares have become as common as Midwestern tornadoes. Cantaloupes, jalapen~os, lettuce, spinach and tomatoes have all been subject to major recalls in recent years. And a growing list of manufacturers and trade associations joined consumer advocates in begging for stricter regulations — calls that the Bush administration largely rejected.
A clutch of legislative proposals this year would offer fixes to the system, and people offering those measures expect President Obama to support them because, as a candidate, he repeatedly promised reforms.
“Far too often, tainted food is not recalled until too late,” Mr. Obama said last year. “When I am president, it will not be business as usual when it comes to food safety. I will provide additional resources to hire more federal food inspectors.”
Nearly all of the proposed legislation under consideration would require companies like the Peanut Corporation of America to lay out specific plans for manufacturing safely and testing routinely. The bills would require that test results and other records be made available to government inspectors upon demand, and would provide additional money for more intense inspections of domestic and foreign food factories. Some would also fix the patchwork system by which outbreaks are detected.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, also propose creating a food agency independent of the F.D.A. so that food would receive single-minded attention. At present, at least 12 federal agencies regulate food safety. The battle between those who would strengthen the F.D.A. and those who would break it up will be an important fight this year.
“I think I can prevail on the president to take a fresh look at this,” Mr. Durbin said. “We can no longer forgive or explain what’s happening with food safety in this country.”
Neither the White House nor the Health and Human Services Department would comment on Thursday. But the peanut case, critics say, demonstrates just how badly the system needs fixing, starting with the patchwork surveillance system that is the first indicator that something has gone wrong.
Cases like Christopher’s are reported to local health departments, which in turn are to report them to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By mid-November, the disease centers had seen enough cases of a similar strain of salmonella to be concerned.
“The numbers were not necessarily significant initially — one here, one there,” said Lola Russell, a disease centers spokeswoman. “Over time, those numbers began to grow.”
By mid-December, the Minnesota Department of Health, known as among the best in the nation, had received reports of nine people with salmonella poisoning. As a result, the department’s Team Diarrhea, a group of graduate students who work nights, started calling patients and their caregivers to ask about their food choices .
“We had a lot of peanut-butter eaters,” said Carlota Medus, a state epidemiologist. “But none of the brand names were matching up well.”
Other states were reporting similar cases, but as in Minnesota, no one could figure out the shared food. The process is fraught with uncertainty. State health officials ask people what they remember eating in the days before they became ill. Poor memories and bad records hamper these efforts, and officials are often sent on fruitless pursuits.
Delay is part of the problem. More than two weeks generally pass between the time someone is diagnosed with an illness and the result of a stool sample test is passed on to federal officials.
Last year, the F.D.A. announced a recall of tomatoes, only to discover near the end of the outbreak that the problem had actually been with jalapen~os. Tomato growers, who saw much of their crop destroyed and endured millions in losses, were outraged.
With the illnesses involving peanut butter, an initial suspect was chicken.
“The chicken was actually a red herring,” said Ms. Russell of the C.D.C., a diversion that resulted from an outbreak of illness among people who had eaten chicken at an Ohio restaurant as well as peanut butter at a school cafeteria.
Then on Dec. 22, a nursing home in northern Minnesota reported a cluster of cases. Investigating outbreaks in nursing homes is both more challenging and easier than elsewhere — easier because the facilities have set menus, harder because patients are often unable to say what menu choices they ate.
Then another nursing home reported illnesses. On Dec. 28, a Minnesota elementary school reported two children who had become ill. The holidays prevented state workers from talking to school cafeteria workers, but the health department was able to track down the school’s food supplier. Everyone seemed to be eating peanut butter.
Finally, a state health worker asked the nursing homes if they still had jars of the suspect peanut butter. One did, and on Jan. 9, that peanut butter tested positive for salmonella. The state announced that King Nut peanut butter, sold only to institutions, was the culprit. King Nut’s product was made by the Peanut Corporation of America.
The F.D.A. then descended on the Georgia plant with a team of inspectors. It used authority granted under a 2002 bioterrorism law to demand records that inspectors from the Georgia Agriculture Department, which had inspected it twice before without finding serious violations, had not been given access to.
The records showed that on 12 occasions from 2007 to 2008, tests of peanut products made at the plant were contaminated by salmonella. Each time, retests came up clean. But F.D.A. officials said the initial tests should have led plant officials to quarantine their product and clean their facility — neither of which occurred.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
source: nytimes.com
Christopher Meunier, 7, had not been sick since he was a toddler, but in late November, he suddenly had a high fever and bloody diarrhea and started vomiting.
Christopher Meunier had salmonella poisoning last year. “He was just screaming in pain,” his mother, Gabrielle Meunier, said.“He was just in screaming pain,” said his mother, Gabrielle Meunier of South Burlington, Vt. “He said, ‘It hurts so bad, I want to die’ — something you don’t expect to hear out of a 7-year-old’s mouth.”
Hospitalized for six days, Christopher had salmonella poisoning, making him one of more than 500 people sickened across the country after eating peanut butter or peanut products made at a Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Ga.
The Food and Drug Administration has charged that the company knowingly shipped contaminated products to some of the largest food makers in the country from a plant that was never designed to make peanut butter safely, causing one of the most extensive food recalls in history. The company responded that it disagreed with some of the agency’s findings and that it had “taken extraordinary measures to identify and recall all products that have been identified as presenting a potential risk.”
Food scares have become as common as Midwestern tornadoes. Cantaloupes, jalapen~os, lettuce, spinach and tomatoes have all been subject to major recalls in recent years. And a growing list of manufacturers and trade associations joined consumer advocates in begging for stricter regulations — calls that the Bush administration largely rejected.
A clutch of legislative proposals this year would offer fixes to the system, and people offering those measures expect President Obama to support them because, as a candidate, he repeatedly promised reforms.
“Far too often, tainted food is not recalled until too late,” Mr. Obama said last year. “When I am president, it will not be business as usual when it comes to food safety. I will provide additional resources to hire more federal food inspectors.”
Nearly all of the proposed legislation under consideration would require companies like the Peanut Corporation of America to lay out specific plans for manufacturing safely and testing routinely. The bills would require that test results and other records be made available to government inspectors upon demand, and would provide additional money for more intense inspections of domestic and foreign food factories. Some would also fix the patchwork system by which outbreaks are detected.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, also propose creating a food agency independent of the F.D.A. so that food would receive single-minded attention. At present, at least 12 federal agencies regulate food safety. The battle between those who would strengthen the F.D.A. and those who would break it up will be an important fight this year.
“I think I can prevail on the president to take a fresh look at this,” Mr. Durbin said. “We can no longer forgive or explain what’s happening with food safety in this country.”
Neither the White House nor the Health and Human Services Department would comment on Thursday. But the peanut case, critics say, demonstrates just how badly the system needs fixing, starting with the patchwork surveillance system that is the first indicator that something has gone wrong.
Cases like Christopher’s are reported to local health departments, which in turn are to report them to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By mid-November, the disease centers had seen enough cases of a similar strain of salmonella to be concerned.
“The numbers were not necessarily significant initially — one here, one there,” said Lola Russell, a disease centers spokeswoman. “Over time, those numbers began to grow.”
By mid-December, the Minnesota Department of Health, known as among the best in the nation, had received reports of nine people with salmonella poisoning. As a result, the department’s Team Diarrhea, a group of graduate students who work nights, started calling patients and their caregivers to ask about their food choices .
“We had a lot of peanut-butter eaters,” said Carlota Medus, a state epidemiologist. “But none of the brand names were matching up well.”
Other states were reporting similar cases, but as in Minnesota, no one could figure out the shared food. The process is fraught with uncertainty. State health officials ask people what they remember eating in the days before they became ill. Poor memories and bad records hamper these efforts, and officials are often sent on fruitless pursuits.
Delay is part of the problem. More than two weeks generally pass between the time someone is diagnosed with an illness and the result of a stool sample test is passed on to federal officials.
Last year, the F.D.A. announced a recall of tomatoes, only to discover near the end of the outbreak that the problem had actually been with jalapen~os. Tomato growers, who saw much of their crop destroyed and endured millions in losses, were outraged.
With the illnesses involving peanut butter, an initial suspect was chicken.
“The chicken was actually a red herring,” said Ms. Russell of the C.D.C., a diversion that resulted from an outbreak of illness among people who had eaten chicken at an Ohio restaurant as well as peanut butter at a school cafeteria.
Then on Dec. 22, a nursing home in northern Minnesota reported a cluster of cases. Investigating outbreaks in nursing homes is both more challenging and easier than elsewhere — easier because the facilities have set menus, harder because patients are often unable to say what menu choices they ate.
Then another nursing home reported illnesses. On Dec. 28, a Minnesota elementary school reported two children who had become ill. The holidays prevented state workers from talking to school cafeteria workers, but the health department was able to track down the school’s food supplier. Everyone seemed to be eating peanut butter.
Finally, a state health worker asked the nursing homes if they still had jars of the suspect peanut butter. One did, and on Jan. 9, that peanut butter tested positive for salmonella. The state announced that King Nut peanut butter, sold only to institutions, was the culprit. King Nut’s product was made by the Peanut Corporation of America.
The F.D.A. then descended on the Georgia plant with a team of inspectors. It used authority granted under a 2002 bioterrorism law to demand records that inspectors from the Georgia Agriculture Department, which had inspected it twice before without finding serious violations, had not been given access to.
The records showed that on 12 occasions from 2007 to 2008, tests of peanut products made at the plant were contaminated by salmonella. Each time, retests came up clean. But F.D.A. officials said the initial tests should have led plant officials to quarantine their product and clean their facility — neither of which occurred.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
source: nytimes.com
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