The FDA lacks regulation, manpower, and inspection directives, and this costs Americans' health and wellbeing.
The Big Picture We’re still getting over the fact that Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is back after a six-month hiatus, but here we are. As the satire news show gets up to speed with everything they have to cover, we’ve been getting episodes whose main topics are less urgent but still relevant all year long, like… diarrhea. This week’s episode used the uncomfortable and inconvenient bowel movement issue to kick off the topic of food safety.
The episode then moves on to remind us all about the Abbott nightmare in which the factory had to shut down its factories due to health safety violations that the FDA was slow to acknowledge and act on. The movement came at the cost of an infant who consumed the Abbott baby formula and developed a rare bacterial infection. This was only discovered because a company whistleblower exposed the Abbott violations in a 34-page document – and even so, the FDA only acted on it four months later.
The FDA Issue Isn't New — And It Will Continue As shocking as it is, reports of lax practices by the FDA are not new and date back several decades. The biggest issue is that, as it happens, the Food and Drug Administration prioritizes the work on drugs and massively overlooks the production and maintenance of food – which has led FDA officials to joke about how the F is “silent” in FDA.
Then there is the sheer amount of produce farms, restaurant chains, food processing facilities, and even vending machine operators that need to be inspected by the FDA, which amounts to roughly 800,000 establishments that would need to be inspected frequently – and more than half of them are overseas. In the baby formula department alone, the FDA had a whopping thirteen people allocated to oversee it. To say that the FDA is stretched thin is an understatement.
This is the kind of scenario that allows for events like e.coli outbreaks to happen, and what surprisingly makes leafy foods potentially more dangerous than others because they aren’t boiled or fried – which kills bacteria in other products like meat and vegetables. The solution? An FDA overhaul, that has already been put in motion. The problem is, that no funding is used to back it up and guidelines for new approaches have been in the works for over a decade with little progress.
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