aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, December 21, 2007

Reuters: Top health issues of 2008

I think their headline is wrong. Or all of the top health issues they foresee in the year ahead are food issues. Here are 2 of the 8:

4. What’s Natural?

Rules for the labeling of organically grown meat are pretty strict in the United States, but when it comes to naturally raised, it’s something of a free-for-all.

As things stand, meat or poultry with a “natural” label must be minimally processed and mean what the marketer says it does.  But nobody is really checking, and there is some debate over what constitutes “minimally processed”.  Should injecting chicken with sodium solution or binding agents take away its natural status, for example?  What about treating red meat with carbon monoxide in order to make it look fresher?  The FDA will attempt to settle these and other questions in 2008 as it reviews the use of the “natural” label for fresh meat.  The public comment period on the review ends Jan. 28. [...]

8. Fixing the FDA/USDA

This month, a Food and Drug Administration committee said in a report that funding shortages had put the FDA in crisis mode, to the point where public safety was at risk.

It pointed to hand-written safety inspection reports, food plant inspections occurring as infrequently as once a decade and a full-time pet-food safety staff of two as signs of a widespread, serious problem at the federal agency in charge of regulating 80 percent of the food sold in the United States, as well as cosmetics, drugs, vaccines and medical devices—the products the agency oversees account for about a quarter of every consumer dollar spent by Americans, the FDA says.  The agency has seen its responsibilities increase as its budget decreased, and the globalization of food has changed the playing field and added new concerns to its long list.  To hear that the FDA is in trouble likely comes as little surprise: between contaminated pet food, meat recalls, warnings on the popular diabetes drug Avandia and accusations of politically motivated appointments, the agency has had a bad year in the court of public opinion.  What remains to be seen for the year to come is whether the FDA will get the money it says it needs to fix itself—and if that will be enough to do the job.