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FDA's Ineffective Tomato Probe Is Economic Hurricane For State

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 2, 2008

Food should not make people sick. When it does, federal authorities need to move decisively to warn the public and, equally important, to isolate the problem.

The Food and Drug Administration succeeded at only half of its job this spring when it quickly warned that raw tomatoes might be carrying a rare salmonella strain. It never found out the truth and left an entire industry stained and hurting.

We first learned of the tomato problem weeks ago when we ordered a BLT for lunch and it arrived without the T, along with an apology from the waitress that tomatoes were temporarily off the menu.

Now it's July and food inspectors still aren't sure what tomatoes, if any, are to blame for carrying the bacteria. Tomatoes grown in Hillsborough and many other Florida counties have been ruled perfectly safe, but too late to save tomato growers statewide from an economic catastrophe.

The National Restaurant Association says its members have lost $100 million and is demanding an investigation of the FDA. Florida tomato growers have lost much more than that. Sales are off 60 percent, tons of market-ready Florida tomatoes have been dumped, and retail prices have been sharply cut.

What is doubly frustrating is that an investigation is unlikely to uncover much not already widely known. The FDA's budget to inspect food producers has been cut 56 percent from 2003 to 2007.

The Government Accounting Office has reported that the FDA is one of 15 agencies that collectively administer at least 30 laws related to food safety, and that the agency's ability to meet its basic responsibilities for food safety has been "badly impaired."

For starters, food-safety statutes need to be updated and the agency needs an adequate budget.

The nongovernmental Trust for America's Health reaches a similar conclusion: "The system has not been fundamentally modernized in more than 100 years, has inadequate resources to fight modern bacterial threats, and has been crippled by reductions in the numbers of food inspectors and scientists at agencies responsible for food safety."

The continuing salmonella outbreak has made more than 800 people in 36 states sick with diarrhea, fever, and stomach aches. Very few cases have been reported in Florida.

The U.S. food industry does a great job of filling the supermarkets with safe, clean food, but when a problem surfaces, neither the growers, grocers, nor anyone else in the food supply chain can fix it on their own. Only federal investigators can trace the problem to its source. The longer that takes, the more innocent producers suffer.

Tighter controls at the border also make sense. Less than one percent of imported food is inspected, and inspection of some of it, such as for Chinese seafood, is outsourced to Chinese companies.

As for the tomato problem, so far some 1,700 samples have been tested and all have been clean. The National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta concedes tomatoes might not be to blame at all.

Still, the FDA warns consumers that if they don't know where their tomatoes were grown, don't eat them. Florida counties that have not been linked to the outbreak are: Hillsborough, Pasco, Polk, Manatee, Sarasota, Jackson, Gadsden, Leon, Jefferson, Madison, Suwannee, Hamilton, Hardee, DeSoto, Highlands, Sumter, Citrus, Hernando, and Charlotte.

It is terribly unfair for growers and packers running wholesome operations to be kept under suspicion for so long.

Nationwide, some 300,000 people are hospitalized each year and 5,000 die after eating something accidentally tainted. It is hard to imagine the damage terrorists could do if they decided to target a segment of the food industry for attack. For the good of the economy and the health of consumers, food safety and security must become a higher priority, immediately.

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