FDA Constraints Tied to Budget belt tightening

 FDA witness, Michael Taylor, Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine, testified in Congress on Wednesday.  He made the case before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee that FDA needs greater resources to fulfill the legislative and regulatory mandate of FSMA.  

 “We will continue our efforts to make the best use of the resources we have, but I can say with absolute certainty that we cannot do all that is asked of us without additional resources,” said Taylor. 

Dingell, US Rep., asked Taylor to submit details about what the agency would require. When FSMA was approved in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that FDA would need an increase of more than $580 million to fund the expanded food safety activities.

The activities include implementing the Foreign Supplier Verification Program; conducting more foreign inspections; working more closely on food safety with foreign governments to leverage their efforts; and improving FDA’s data and import systems to facilitate prompt entry of foods that meet the safety standards.

According to the report to Congress on Building Domestic Capacity to Implement FSMA, FDA requires an additional $400-450 million to fulfill the FSMA mandate.

The President’s FY 2014 Budget proposed two fees. One is a registration fee for those domestic and foreign food facilities which are required to register with FDA; The second is an import use fee of a minimal amount (about $20) per line entry, meaning each portion of a shipment offered for import listed as a separate item on an entry document.

Domestic vs foreign rules was another hot topic.  FSMA still has more supporters than opponents, but opponents do exist. Gary Black, Agriculture Commissioner, said he would fight proposed federal food-safety regulations that he said would cripple Georgia’s produce industry. Georgia farmers are concerned the new rules will leave them unable to compete with cheaper imports that aren’t held to the same standards, in an “even playing field.”

“If we have to lead from our industry here and our congressional delegation here, then by gum, that’s what we’ll do,” he said.

The proponents of ‘fair and equal treatment’ argue that 75% of rules are for domestic products currently, whereas 60% of fresh fruits and vegetables and 80% of seafood supply come from abroad. Taylor response was  "The foreign supplier verification proposed rule, would require importers to perform certain risk-based activities to verify that food imported into the US has been produced using processes and procedures that provide the same level of public health protection as those required of domestic food producers under the preventive controls or produce safety regulations."

But most significantly, the FSMA, for the first time, gives FDA authority to recall all food imports, as currently food companies issue recalls voluntarily. Watch out!

The regulations are signed into law in early 2011, and Al Green, US Rep., asked why it took so long to begin releasing regulations. Taylor just stated that it was a function of the complexity of the issues. All FSMA regulations are subject to a court imposed deadline of June 30, 2015.  Unless and until the regs are finalized, foreign and domestic producers/food manufacturers, importers, and shippers will be operating in uncertain territory.

Stay tuned. We’ll be watching these developments for all GFSF members.

AB Sciex develops meat speciation test

Scientists at the university of Munster and AB Sciex have developed a meat speciation method for detecting pig and horse contamination. The method is based on the liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectormetry.

For Muslim and Jewish communities it is critical to know whether foods are permitted to eat('halal' and 'kosher') due to Islamic or Jewish beliefs. For those communities, which consists of 23% of the global population, scientists at the German university and AB Sciex have developed the method to detect meat contamination. 

Prof. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Humpf, head of the institut fur lebensmittelchemie (Institue for Food Chemistry), university of Munster said:
"Scientists in routine testing laboratories worldwide will now be able to use this method to detect and distinguish trace amounts of pig and horse in many food products."
Species authentication is becoming more important due to the drastic increases of fraudulent substitution with meat from cheap species, for economical reasons. Compared to traditional detecting methods, it is more efficient as it can detect markers of multiple, differnt animal species at once. 

AB Sciex, a member of GFSF(Global Food Safety Forum), has previously developed methods for protein screening, including techniques for detecting allergens such as eggs, milk, sesame seeds, nuts and mustard simultaneously in food samples. 

Eating radioactive cesium from Japan? Avoid these seafood products to be sure

Canada is up there on environmental awareness and monitoring contaminants in seafood. It was one of the first countries in the world to talk about the dangers of mercury from industry in fish, and now concerned citizens are comparing scary data on fish and seafood products from Japan after its 2011 nuclear meltdown.

Are you eating radioactive caesium? Read on for the list of what to avoid.

According to this source you should avoid eating the following products that come from the western Pacific Ocean. It’s a good reason for shark fin soup eaters (shark fin soup can give you brain damage) to stop the cruel practice, with tuna seaweed and carp on the list as well.

Cesium was found in these groups:

• 73 per cent of mackerel tested

• 91 per cent of the halibut

• 92 per cent of the sardines

• 93 per cent of the tuna and eel

• 94 per cent of the cod and anchovies

• 100 per cent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

The problem with fish and seafood products is that it’s very hard to trace the source of the products you buy in a regular supermarket. If you live in the Middle East you can opt to buy locally caught produce (but be mindful of local mercury reports and what’s in the fish from pollutants at sea), buy farmed fish from land-based pools, or buy from sustainably harvested sources that might be flown in from countries in safe zones.

According to the report on Reader Supported News, some of the fish and products mentioned above were caught hundreds of miles from the Japanese coast. When the reactor blew it emitted an estimated 10 to 100 times more radiation to the sea than the Chernobyl reactor explosion, according to sources in the report.

Japan meanwhile is the only country really monitoring what’s in its fish and seafood products.

According to the story the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which monitors food safety, says it is aware of the numbers but says the amounts of cesium detected are small. They have stopped testing the products coming to Canada from Japan.

“Approximately 60 per cent of fish have shown to have detectable levels of radionuclides,” it said in an emailed statement. “The majority of exported fish to Canada are caught much farther from the coast of Japan, and the Japanese testing has shown that these fish have not been contaminated with high levels of radionuclides.”

Japanese data on the other hand, shows something else: “In November, 18 per cent of cod exceeded a new radiation ceiling for food to be implemented in Japan in April – along with 21 per cent of eel, 22 per cent of sole and 33 per cent of seaweed.

“Overall, one in five of the 1,100 catches tested in November exceeded the new ceiling of 100 becquerels per kilogram. (Canada’s ceiling for radiation in food is much higher: 1,000 becquerels per kilogram.)”

“It’s completely untrue to say this level of radiation is safe or harmless,” said Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

Dangers of exposure to radioactive materials has led one Canadian Dr. Dale Dewar to check and limit what her grandkids are eating when they come to visit her. “We suspect we’re going to see more cancers, decreased fetal viability, decreased fertility, increased metabolic defects – and we expect them to be generational,” she said.

If you want to know what’s okay to eat, Tafline has put together a list on sustainable fish and seafood options from the Monteray Bay a while back, but we suppose that sardines from the Pacific will now be taken off the list.

Moderation is probably a safe bet if you don’t know what you are eating when it comes to fish and seafood. Pregnant and nursing women, and small children should limit their intake of most kinds of fatty fish at all times due to exposure to mercury and fat soluble pollutants. Now add fish and seafood with cesium to the list.

Local watchdogs empowered in food safety shake-up

Chinese provincial governments are quickly empowering local food safety watchdogs in line with the requirements of the central government to prevent food scandals.

Since the China Food and Drug Administration was launched during the cabinet restructuring of last March to supervise the full process of food production, circulation and consumption, a primary mission of provincial governments has been to correspondingly restructure their food safety monitoring mechanism.

During the reshuffle, the functions of quality inspection departments are intensified as they gain food safety jurisdiction previously held by health as well as industry and commerce departments.

To make sure the reshuffle runs smoothly and efficiently, the China Food and Drug Administration has sent out work teams to various provinces.

While inspecting the work in central China's Hunan Province in mid-January, Liu Peizhi, vice minister of the administration, urged provincial governments to complete the reshuffle as quickly as possible on the premise that the restructured outfits could have sufficient resources to fulfill the mission of the administration.

The administration is yet to announce the progress of the nationwide restructuring.

However, Li Hongyuan, director of the food and drug administration of Xiamen City in east China's Fujian Province, was quoted by the Xiamen Daily as saying that more than two-thirds of 31 provincial regions in the Chinese mainland have completed relevant restructuring so far.

Yan Zuqiang, chief of the Shanghai Municipal Food and Drug Administration, said that one goal of the restructuring was to increase the number of grassroots inspectors.

Describing the human resources structure of the old monitoring mechanism as "olive-shaped," with the higher management on the top and grassroots inspectors on the bottom largely outnumbered by middle management, Yan said that law enforcement at the grassroots level has been very weak.

After the restructuring, he said, the number of local grassroots inspectors in Shanghai had risen to 1,700, representing the bulk of the city bureau's staff.

Food safety has become a top concern in China as a string of safety scandals, particularly the one in 2008 when melamine-tainted baby formula caused the deaths of at least six infants and sickened 300,000 others, have crippled customer confidence.

Shanghai municipal legislator Xu Liping agreed that the weakness of food safety supervision was at the grassroots.

"The number of inspectors cannot be increased infinitely. The key is to improve their competency and work style," said Xu.

Zhao Renrong, deputy to the Shanghai People's Congress, the city's legislature, proposed that a nationwide blacklisting system be established based on the credit records of food business managers.

"Without such a system, a business owner who breaks the law can easily run away from his problems by reopening another shop under the name of his relative," said Zhao, also chief of the Tingdong Village Branch of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai's Jinshan District.

Although many places including Shanghai have started to experiment with blacklisting lawbreakers, Liu Zhengguo, director of the enterprise credit management committee of the metropolis, said that a nationwide credit system was badly needed to prevent lawbreakers continuing their malpractice elsewhere in the country.

"We must ensure no Chinese can afford to have a bad record in terms of food safety in this country," he said.

Liu Boying, director of the Commission of Commerce in Hongkou District in Shanghai, suggested that digital technologies should be widely used to strengthen certification of products' origins.

For instance, consumers should be able to learn the exact breeding information of aquatic products by scanning the label, said Liu, adding that the biggest challenge was how to raise the enthusiasm of enterprises with certifications of origin.

To solve the problem, Shanghai has started legislation on compulsory certification of the origin of foodstuff, which may cover pork, vegetables, aquatic products, grain crops, dairy and cooking oil, according to the municipality's food safety supervision chief Yan Zuqiang.

Bird Flu Isn’t Just China’s Problem Anymore

With the Chinese New Year and the Olympics on the horizon, health officials can only watch and wait for a potential pandemic.in

                                                                                                                       Computer rendering of an avian influenza virus

And that means the next plane could bring a pandemic to the U.S. or anywhere else around the world. “The bottom line is the health security of the U.S. is only as strong as the health security of every country around the world,” says Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. “We are all connected by the food we eat, the water the drink and the air we breathe.”As the first human cases of H7N9 bird flu infection outside of China begin to emerge—in Taiwan and Hong Kong—health officials around the world are preparing for a potentially perfect storm for a massive flu outbreak. On Thursday, billions of Chinese will be on the move to celebrate the Lunar New Year, creating ripe conditions for the spread of the influenza virus from those already infected. And many of those celebrations will include chickens, the primary carriers of H7N9. In addition, with the Winter Olympics, one of the world’s largest sporting events, just two weeks away, the virus could find the ideal conditions for breaking out.

So far, the World Health Organization reports that 246 people, mostly in China, have been infected with H7N9 since the virus was first identified last year, and nearly a quarter of them have died. As the first cases outside of the China emerged, Hong Kong officials ordered the culling of 20,000 chickens from its primary poultry market after one bird tested positive for H7N9, and banned live poultry imports for three weeks from the mainland. In the meantime the Chinese government is shutting down live poultry sales in its eastern provinces after a spike in cases in recent weeks. Because H7N9 does not make birds sick, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish infected poultry from healthy animals, so officials aren’t taking any chances. Shanghai is closing its live poultry markets for three months beginning in February.

What concerns health experts is that H7N9 meets two of the three conditions for becoming a pandemic—it is widespread among birds, and it can pass from birds to people. So far, it does not appear to transmit easily from person to person, but if it did, says Frieden, “that would be a big problem. The likelihood of having a pandemic would be much, much higher.”

What could push the virus to move from person to person? One worrying possibility—as H7N9 circulates among birds, it could recombine with other influenza strains and find a way to infect humans more efficiently by jumping from host to host. It’s also possible that the H7N9 infecting people could recombine with other strains currently circulating, such as H1N1 or even H5N1, another bird flu, and become more virulent as well. Vietnam confirmed that a 52-year old man died this week of H5N1.

If H7N9 were to become a pandemic, there is a vaccine that researchers have developed, but Frieden says it’s not very effective and may require more than one dose, which could complicate distribution if there were an urgent need to immunize the population. But other measures for containing outbreaks that have proven effective in the past, including reducing the contact between people and infected animals, implementing social distancing strategies to prevent rapid spread of the virus, and dispensing medications to treat the severely ill, could help to contain an outbreak. “Flu reminds us that we are all connected by the air we breathe,” says Frieden. “There is no way for us to know if a pandemic will happen tomorrow or 10 years from now or never. But what we can do is be even better prepared than we have in the past if it happens.”

Chinese Chicken Ban Proposed By Food Safety Advocates

A Chinese chicken ban petition was recently posted on Change.org and is rapidly gaining signatures. Concerns that chicken from China could soon make its way into the American food supply sparked the movement, which has more than 250,000 signatures. Last year the US Department of Agriculture announced that chicken processed in China would be allowed to be sold in the United States.

The Chinese chicken ban organizers refer to themselves simply as “three concerned moms and food safety advocates.” The women also stated that they are hoping that the Change.org petition will prompt both Congress and the USDA to ban poultry processed in China from public school menus and prevent the meat from ever making it to the American market.

The Philippines recently banned Chinese chicken over fears that the “highly pathogenic “avian influenza (bird flu), HPAI, was present in the poultry. The ban was enacted after evidence reportedly revealed that food safety failures have occurred multiple times. The food security incidents include dangerous levels of mercury being found in baby formula, rat meat sold as lamb, and the discovery of thousands of diseased pig carcasses in the Huangpu River.

Dr. Barbara Kowalyck, one of the Chinese chicken petition organizers, said:

"I know first-hand the devastating impact of a breakdown in the food safety system. China has had numerous problems with food safety, and it is clear that, as of now, they do not have a robust food safety system. Importing poultry that has been processed i n China is risky, and it's a risk we don't have to take and should not be forced to take. Food safety should never be taken for granted - especially when our children are involved."

In 2001 Dr. Kowalyck’s toddler son died from complications related to an E. coli infection. In her position as a faculty members at North Carolina State University, she has worked tirelessly on the food safety front and co-founded the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention. She also serves on the advisory board for the Health Policy Institute’s Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University and has been a member of the USDA National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods.

The deadly avian influenza virus may be spreading between people, according to a report by Off The Grid News. Researchers believe that a woman in China caught the bird flu, or H7N9 virus, from her father and not from poultry. Both the woman and her father died from the disease. The woman, just 32 years old and reported to be healthy, had no contact with poultry. Instead, her only known exposure to the disease was visiting her mortally ill father in the hospital. The father made regular visits to a live poultry market.

Excerpt from the Change.org. Chinese chicken ban petition:

"We urge Congress, President Obama, and his administration to stop chicken from, or processed in, China from reaching our supermarkets and the meals we feed our school children by: (1) Ensuring that Chinese-processed chicken is not included in the national School lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Child and Adult Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program; and (2) Preventing funds from being used to implement any rule that would allow poultry raised or slaughtered in China to be exported to the United States."

New signatures on the Chinese chicken ban are emailed to USDA Secretary of Agriculture Tim Vilsack, President Obama, and Representatives Sam Farr and Robert Aderholt, as well as Senators Mark Pryor and Roy Blunt.

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1112101/chinese-chicken-ban-proposed-by-food-safety-advocates/#ffVckgddt90G6pT0.99

No timetable for GM food sales

No Timetable for GMO Food Sales in China

China's Ministry of Agriculture last Wednesday said that there was not yet a timetable for the commercialization of genetically modified food, while the safety certificates for the country's GMO rice and corn would expire soon. In recent years, Chinese citizens have been concerned with the potential harm of GMOs on human health and questioned the safety of consuming GMO foods. This wave of public pressure on the Chinese government has made the state government hesitate to use GMOs in food production.

Chen Xiaohua, vice-minister of the Ministry of Agriculture, stated that the ministry will continue to scrutinize the commercial production of GMO food, as a response to a question on the expiration of China's first batch of safety certificates for GMO rice and corn, which were issued in 2009. The certificates are scheduled to expire this year but their commercial production is yet to be started.

As Chen stressed China's "active and cautious" policy toward GMO food, the Ministry of Agriculture also began to strengthen research and try to breed new GMO strains with independent intellectual property rights as quickly as possible. By "cautious," Chen means that the Chinese government would work to ensure safety in promoting and applying GM food. “That's why we have made strict laws and regulations, and set up a whole set of safety evaluation mechanisms and a regulating chain involving various departments," said Chen. His remarks suggested that the commercialization of GM food could not be approved in the short term due to public fears about its safety. The public does not have much knowledge about GMO food, which increases their fear, especially as food safety issues have been a heated topic.

Although the government has stressed that research on GM products is encouraged, scientists may still feel disappointed and unconfident about the future of such research, as it is costly and currently cannot make much profit. The promotion of GMO food has been a controversial issue for a long time, as some scientists claim that the only way to solve the growing food security problem in China is to plant GMO crops. More than 60 scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering jointly submitted a letter to top authorities in July 2013, calling for promoting the planting of GMO rice.

However, the public is skeptical about GMO safety and continues to exert pressure on the Chinese government. Some local governments have banned GMOs under public pressure. Zhangye in Northwest China's Gansu Province banned any enterprises and organizations from growing, trading and using GM seeds, not products, in October 2013, in order to ensure the safety reputation of its agricultural products, which made it the first city in China to issue such a measure.