All foodborne illness is local—or much of it anyway

Don’t let me distract you as you work diligently to implement the new food safety regulations, as food makers cobble together effective preventive controls programs and food packaging makers fret over just how to provide verification of their compliance.

Eric Greenberg
Eric Greenberg

But I do want to point out that the whole effort might have less effect on foodborne illness than you might think.

The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 is widely touted as the biggest change to food safety law in decades, and it probably is, and I unreservedly encourage all packagers and food makers to be in full compliance with its requirements. But FSMA is directed in most of its provisions at food manufacturers regulated by FDA. And if food safety is your goal, you can’t overlook the local angle, that is, the many thousands of sites such as restaurants, grocers, vending machines, and cafeterias—the places that are on the front lines for local regulators more than for FDA.

Those local operations are generally left to regulators on the state and local levels—think of your municipal health department inspector—with FDA playing coach and overseer “by providing a model Food Code, scientifically-based guidance, training, program evaluation, and technical assistance,” says its web site.

When FDA published its final Good Manufacturing Practices regulations makeover late last year, it said it estimated that “processed foods covered by this rulemaking are responsible for approximately 903,000 foodborne illnesses each year” in the U.S., and their new rule placing new obligations on produce firms should avoid “approximately 331,964 illnesses per year.” Sounds good, except that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that “each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.”

So even a fully successful FDA regulatory program will only make a small dent in this large problem. (But I will say that I also saw a 2011 published study in Emerging Infectious Diseases that said there were 9.4 million episodes of foodborne illness including 55,961 hospitalizations and 1,351 deaths. That’s a much lower estimate than CDC’s but still a much, much bigger number than the number expected to be affected by the FSMA requirements.)

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