Salmonella Warning Signs Ignored

It looks like the biggest food illness outbreak in years was preceded by huge warning signs the FDA did nothing about.

This year’s salmonella outbreak, which has been traced to peppers from Mexico, may have been avoided if officials had acted more quickly on clear signs of problems at the U.S. border. According to this AP article, scores of “disease-ridden shipments” of Mexican peppers were turned back at the border this year already. Despite being the most frequently rejected crop by border inspectors (with several shipments found to have salmonella), the FDA did nothing. From the article:

…Food safety advocates question why the agency did not pay more attention to the peppers being stopped at the border and why it took the nation’s largest foodborne illness outbreak for the agency to ratchet up its screening of companies known for shipping dirty chilies.

"If the fact that they were showing up on problem lists for a year doesn't make them high-risk, I don't know what does," said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel with Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "If it's across the board, then that's a systemic problem that FDA needs to be able to nimbly respond to."

Yeah, that’s pretty much right. This is just more of the now-piling evidence that the FDA is incompetent in protecting citizens.

-- Dylan Blaylock