Washington - President Clinton marked the Fourth of July holiday by outlining new federal actions to ensure food safety, including requiring new warning labels on juices, and by prodding Congress to do its part.
The steps detailed by the president in his weekly radio address include requiring warning labels to be placed on all fruit and vegetable juices that are not pasteurized to prevent illnesses from bacteria.
Clinton also ordered the Health and Agriculture Departments to create a Joint Institute for Food Safety Research to help identify potential threats to food safety and to develop actions to eliminate those threats.
And Clinton pressed Congress on several pieces of legislation, including his proposal to spend $101 million on various food safety initiatives, such as hiring 225 additional food inspectors within the Food and Drug Administration.
The administration's other legislative initiatives include requiring the FDA to block the import of foods that do not meet US food safety standards, and giving the Agriculture Department the authority to issue mandatory recalls and impose civil penalties for unsafe meat and poultry.
In the radio address, taped in China but delivered in the United States on the day synonymous with backyard barbecues, Clinton said, “Our food supply is the most bountiful and the safest in the world, but we know we can do better.”
Food safety grabbed national attention in 1993, when an outbreak of E. coli bacteria in fast-food hamburgers was blamed for four deaths and some 700 illnesses in Western states.
Although the US food supply is widely considered the world's safest, millions are sickened and some 9,000 people die each year from food-related illness.
Clinton cited an incident last year, when apple juice contaminated with a strain of E. coli bacteria was blamed for the death of a 16- month-old child in Washington state and the hospitalization of more than a dozen other children.
Clinton said the warnings on non-pasteurized juice will help prevent thousands of illnesses each year.
He said the proposed new Joint Institute for Food Safety Research “will join the resources of the public and private sectors and bring together the talents of the most esteemed scientists in the government, in universities and in business to develop cutting-edge techniques to keep our food safe.”
The president chided Congress for its refusal so far to enact his food safety proposal, which he said would “keep unsafe food away from our borders, out of our stores and off our dining room tables.”
He also urged the Senate to confirm his selection of Jane Henney to head the FDA, calling her appointment critical to federal food safety efforts.
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