New York - In an effort to decrease the risk of foodborne illnesses, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is placing top priority on expediting review of products such as radiation or chemicals aimed at fighting harmful bacteria in food.
The federal agency will specifically target food additive petitions for agents that are intended to decrease the amounts of illness-causing strains of bacteria such as E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, Cyclospora and Listeria in foods.
The FDA wants to encourage manufacturers to develop these types of products and make them available to the market as soon as possible. However, the expedited petitions would be required to meet the same approval standards that are applied to other additives including “the need for valid scientific evidence, the need to satisfy the safety standard, and the presentation of data to support the petitions,” according to a statement issued by the federal agency.
The most important feature of the initiative is to move applications for the beneficial food additives “to the front of the line so there isn't any time spent waiting in the queue,” said Joseph Levitt, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
The action is part of the federal government's broad food safety initiative. One of the key elements of that initiative is to find “safe, effective prevention technologies that are going to kill bacteria and make the food safe when it arrives to the consumer,” he said.
Although there had been several reports last year of products recalled due to potential and confirmed contamination with E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria, the reason is not that there had been an increase in such incidences, but it is a result of a stronger surveillance system supervised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Levitt said.
The use of DNA “fingerprinting” technology has enabled the CDC, in conjunction with state health departments, to find more bacteria and find it earlier, he said.
President Clinton will propose a 12% increase in funding for food safety programs in the fiscal year 2000 budget. The $105 million increase would be used to expand inspections of domestic food products and the US Department of Agriculture's meat and poultry inspection system.
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