Historic Food Safety Bill Sent to Obama for Passage Into Long-Awaited Law
The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act as passed by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives this week has been sent to the White House for President Barrack Obama to sign into law.
The Senate unanimously approved the bill on Sunday. Yesterday it passed the House by a vote of 215 to 144. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the legislation includes a sweeping overhaul of our nation’s food safety system and works to more effectively prevent, detect, and respond to food-borne illnesses.
By empowering the FDA with more enforcement, inspection and traceback strength in the event of foodborne illness outbreaks, Congress fundamentally has changed the way we protect public health. The bill is meant to prevent contamination before it occurs, steering away from the existing pattern of responding after an outbreak. The bill also improves the government's ability to detect and respond to foodborne illness when outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 and other bacteria happen. It increases the number of inspections the FDA must conduct, and, for the first time, requires importers of foreign food to verify that products grown and processed overseas meet U.S. safety standards.
When President Obama signs the bill, the FDA will be able to initiate food recalls and gain access to company records at production centers to help track food-borne illness outbreaks. And the FDA will now set quality standards for imported foods. Needed in future sessions of Congress is authorization to fund more inspectors.
Noted food safety lawyer Fred Pritzker applauded the long-awaited passage of the Act, which he and many of his clients have actively pushed. Client Randy Napier, for instance, lost his mother to a powerful Salmonella infection that she contracted in the massive 2008-2009 peanut butter and peanut product outbreak that helped convince lawmakers to finally do something about food safety. Randy and his extended family have been an instrumental voice in pressing for the change.
"Every person has the right to purchase and consume nutritious food,'' Pritzker said. "For many of our clients this measure has come too late, but we have every hope that this historic change in law will better protect citizens from deadly and dangerous pathogens that too often are putting us at risk.''
