A Dire Report Card

Like a failing student who manages to crank out a last-minute paper in hopes of bringing his grade up to a “D”, USDA and FDA have taken each taken some strong eleventh-hour steps to address the threat of mad cow disease. But a single paper does not an “A” scholar make - and the agencies’ halfhearted effort to make food passingly safe is nowhere near what is required to keep millions of Americans from suffering needlessly in 2004 from devastating foodborne disease.

Last month, USDA banned the use of downer cows for human food, mandated temporary holding of any meat from cattle suspected of having BSE while tests are completed, and took other long-overdue steps to keep spinal tissue and other known BSE carrier-tissues out of the human food supply. FDA followed suit by announcing a host of new measures for animal feed, including a ban on feeding cow blood, poultry litter, and plate waste to cattle. These actions are well-warranted, and demonstrate a courage to stand up to industry previously unseen from the current administration. Yet the new measures remain grossly insufficient to protect American families from the impacts of mad cow disease - and do next-to-nothing to prevent the 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 annual deaths that already occur annually from contaminated food.

Especially given the spotlight the mad cow fiasco has cast on the inability of government agencies to trace and remove contaminated products from grocery store shelves, USDA and FDA should be putting the full force of their weight behind mandatory recall and traceability legislation. Embarrassed worldwide by the exposure of “too little, too late” precautionary, detection, and enforcement policies for keeping mad cow out of America’s food stream, the agencies should be bolstering food testing and inspection practices nationwide, not just for mad cow but for deadly contaminants like pathogenic E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria. Yet Americans continue to wait for food that is as safe as it can and should be.

More than anything, the recent actions by USDA and FDA demonstrate the ability of our government to move quickly and definitively to make food safer. The fact that we see such action only when it is deemed politically desirable makes it critical that Americans continue to speak out over the very real food safety concerns their families face. Like the failing student, USDA and FDA have shown that they too have the capacity to rise to the occasion - like most failing students, they just need sufficient incentive to succeed.