Outbreaks drive new food rules
WASHINGTON — A field worker has unwashed hands. An animal squeezes through a small tear in a fence. Manure from a nearby hog farm trickles into an irrigation system.
Small mistakes like these are often difficult to identify as the sources of food-borne illnesses, a situation that has frustrated health authorities for years. The Food and Drug Administration and other agencies gather information about a contamination outbreak after people have already been sickened, and their investigations into what went wrong come well after the crucial evidence is gone.
Few rules are on the books that require preventive steps to make many foods — produce in particular — safer. The FDA now hopes to change that through sweeping rules designed to more closely track how growers, packers, shippers, distributors and retailers handle the produce Americans eat as it courses from the farm to consumer's tables.
Coupled with legislation that would give the FDA more enforcement power across the board, the changes could be some of the most significant improvements to the food safety system in decades.
Michael Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for foods, said the rules aren't written yet, but there are four areas upon which they will focus: water quality; employee hygiene; soil, including manure and compost; and wildlife intrusions on produce fields. Because potentially deadly bacteria like E. coli and salmonella come from human or animal feces, keeping excrement or traces of it away from growing foods is the primary objective.
The recent outbreak of E. coli in lettuce, which is thought to have sickened 30 people or more, is just one example of the difficulties in tracing a food-borne outbreak. The FDA still hasn't publicly identified what caused it.
Other outbreaks have been far worse. A 2006 outbreak of E. coli in fresh spinach killed three people and sickened 200. The FDA was not able to confirm the source of the outbreak but said it could have been wild pigs defecating in the area or contaminated water.
