The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ARTICLE ON FOOD SAFETY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E35-E36 on Jan. 31, 2006.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ARTICLE ON FOOD SAFETY
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HON. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN
of maryland
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to call your attention to the following article on food safety, which I submit for the Record, written by my constituent, Richard Gilmore. Mr. Gilmore is the President and CEO of the GIC Group. Mr. Gilmore's article addresses the issue of food safety. While I may not agree with all of Mr. Gilmore's proposals, I recommend this article to every citizen interested in the integrity of the food supply chain and the safety of the food we consume every day.
Get Ready for Health Wars
(By Rick Gilmore)
It's not easy to fight a war when the weapons could be candy bars or milk, and if the battlegrounds are in Halloween candy baskets or dairy farms. And if we ever do master these theaters of warfare, we'll have to prepare for other modes of transmission for pathogens, such as fruit and vegetable juices, canned foods, pastas and other grain-based foods, chicken and fish.
As bad as the chances of a pandemic disease may be, the possibilities for a deliberate attack on our food chain are endless. And worse: They are likely because the weapons are immediately accessible, require minimal training, are cheap to produce and offer high kill ratios of innocent citizenry.
Even before 9/11, our government had been thinking about these ugly scenarios. Multiple scientific studies model and quantify the human impact of the deliberate release of a toxin at a dairy farm or a pathogen in a major city. A theoretical study on milk said a terrorist needs to add only 10 grams of botulism toxin to a truck-full of milk to get 400,000 casualties. An aerosol-generated attack of anthrax sprayed with the prevailing wind could affect as much as 35% of the nearby population within three days, with a case fatality rate as high as 70%.
Governments and the private sector most certainly are attempting to build their own territorial defenses, sometimes more effectively than in others. The Australian method of dealing with candy bars allegedly contaminated with a pesticide was to recall all the affected Mars and Snickers bars, crush them, and dispose of them with a deep burial. The U.K. government detected a carcinogenic food coloring in a Worcestershire sauce ingredient, and it notified consumers and withdrew the product from the shelves. Unfortunately, it did not promptly notify other states in the European Union, violating Europe's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed.
Such accidents are probably impossible to stop. We also cannot eradicate avian flu if it threatens us, but our combat strategy has many weaknesses. President Bush outlined a new plan to spend $7.1 billion to stockpile medications like Tamiflu and Relenza to combat an outbreak. The country expects to have four million doses on hand by Jan. 1, but the World Health Organization recommends stockpiling doses for at least 25% of the population--73 million Americans.
Whatever our country's plans, problems abound. Roche has made it clear that it is already back-ordered more than a year on Tamiflu, and researchers are concerned that there won't be enough antiviral medicine available to blunt the global onslaught of a possible pandemic. A pandemic triggered by a mutated H5N1 virus, moreover, may not be affected by antiviral drugs or any of the vaccines currently in development. Bush belatedly supported efforts to develop cell-based vaccines that can be produced much faster than today's vaccines, but discoveries don't come on timetables.
The BioShield Act of 2004 was passed to address just the kind of threat we face with avian flu. It sets out to accomplish three goals: speed the Food and Drug Administration's approval of drugs and vaccines to counter a bioterror attack; create incentives for companies to develop new products through government-guaranteed purchases of pharmaceuticals and biologics; and secure long-term stockpiles of such products in case of an outbreak. Despite the fanfare of the program, progress has been slow, primarily because of underfunding and uncertainties regarding liability insurance and intellectual property protection.
When it comes to our defense system against bioterrorism, the whole nation is still held hostage. Each leg of the stool--preparedness, surveillance and protection--is wobbly at the moment.
We're planning for an attack within our borders and have placed minimal attention on what occurs outside them, despite the internationalization of our food system. Food ingredients are imported from around the world and exported to consumers and corporate affiliates worldwide. Kansas and the Punjab are part of the same food chain.
Staple food items now travel a minimum of 1,400 miles from farm to table. And yet, we have a system in place under the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture that focuses on U.S. registrations, port notifications and reporting for American-based food companies. Although we seek information on foreign food companies selling and distributing to U.S. companies, the data do not go back to the point of origin. Even here at home we exclude farms, including aquaculture, from any reporting requirements, though on-farm crops are the most likely targets to serve as carriers for the best-known pathogens--stem rust for cereals, Southern corn-leaf blight, rice blast, potato blight and citrus canker. The European Union takes a more thorough approach to traceability, including every link in the food chain from farm to table.
By adhering to a territorial defense strategy, we are leaving ourselves and our trading partners vulnerable when it comes to exports. Right now, a contaminated food item from the U.S. could be exported to another country without our knowledge and without warning to the foreign buyer. European export certification is compulsory unless specifically exempted by the importing country.
Another vulnerability: The pathogen itself. Studying likely pathogens that might be used in an attack is somewhat like finding a needle in a haystack. USDA is now funding research centers to deal with plant diseases and zoonoses, which are pathogens transmitted from animals to humans. Still, the focus is on the usual suspects, and not enough on new pathogens, many of which can be developed cheaply by slightly altering the original virus strain.
We have learned the hard way that one terrorist cell can inflict more human and economic damage than we can protect at a given time. Congress and the Bush administration are addressing the issue, but haven't created a safer food environment. The system in place is a labyrinth of bureaucratic federal regulations that reflect yesterday's assumptions, not future possibilities. Federal funding for state activities has fallen short of their target, and state enforcement capabilities are not uniformly satisfactory. For industry, duplication of regulatory-agency requirements is costly and confounding, particularly for small and medium-size companies. Despite two years' worth of warnings of an avian-flu pandemic, drug companies still lack liability protection to launch and distribute new vaccines.
Closing the loopholes is not a matter of fine tuning because the holes are too wide to close. At home, we need to look to new genomic research that will determine how to develop crops that are resistant to a full range of pathogens. Internationally, there is an urgent need for greater coordination of research and information. No system can be failsafe when it comes to bioterrorism, but we can reshape the one we have today to be more effective.
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