With the peanut butter scare making news — the latest in a series involving salmonella-contaminated foods including tomatoes, jalapeno peppers and E. coli-contaminated spinach — there again rises the public clamor for doing something.
In the not distant past, studies have confirmed that the people reasonably enough are very much concerned about the safety of the food they eat.
Only government has the expertise and authority to do something about it. Food producers who are by tradition and lack of federal resources mainly relied upon to monitor themselves fall short, as the record demonstrates.
The Food and Drug Administration oversees some 80 percent of America’s food supply, excluding meat, poultry and processed egg products. As its name makes plain, it is also the overseer of the nation’s medical supplies.
As the peanut butter brouhaha was gathering force, the General Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, put medical products on their High-Risk List on Jan. 22.
While Americans ponder whether in the face of 500 illnesses and eight deaths to continue to send their kids off to school with the popular peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or if they should go on nibbling on cookies and other goodies containing peanut paste, they should be no less wary about the medicinal pills they are ingesting in ever increasing quantities. Placement on the High-Risk List was earned because “the American consumer may not be adequately protected from unsafe and ineffective medical products” resulting in part from “the globalization of the medical products industry.”
In the recent past you might recall when consumers, allied with state governments that helped them pay for needed drugs, wanted to import drugs from Canada and elsewhere at a much lower cost.
Among the arguments in opposition put forward by the pharmaceutical industry was that their products were American made and therefore safe.
Neglected by Pharma, surely by oversight, is that for years U.S. drug makers were importing ingredients for their pills that were made in America. And, you might well ask, where from did those ingredients come? The answer, of course, is the country that makes a host of lower-cost products, namely China, now the world’s dominant supplier of medicinal ingredients.
Yes, folks, that’s the same China that recently sentenced two of its citizens to death for purveying milk and milk products adulterated with melamine. Melamine is a toxic chemical that can cause cancer and renal failure, among other dire illnesses. It was inserted into baby formula to disguise the fact that the milk had been watered and to give it the appearance of a higher protein value. It caused at least six deaths and some 300,000 illnesses in China.
In the U.S., it led to a clampdown by the FDA that imposed new testing to keep tainted products out of our country. Melamine has also been detected in more than a dozen countries in eggs, yogurt, chocolates and frozen desserts.