000919 GAO Faults USDA & FDA on Food Recalls

Washington - The government needs to track food recalls better to make sure that companies are acting quickly enough to stop contaminated products from reaching consumers, congressional investigators say.

Both the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration, which share oversight of food processors, believe companies conduct recalls in a timely fashion, “but they do not have data to support this view,” according to a report by the General Accounting Office.

USDA doesn't track when recalls are initiated and neither agency knows when or how companies notify distributors or the public or when the recalls are completed, the report said.

“Consumers are not being served as well as they should be by our nation's food recall system,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA). The system “has weak links in communicating and tracking critical recall information.”

Recalls are done voluntarily, although companies sometimes issue them at the request of one of the agencies. USDA handles recalls involving with meat and poultry products, while FDA deals with all other foods. The Clinton administration wants authority to require recalls but the industry has blocked the proposal in Congress.

Companies themselves have trouble tracking the food they recall as they pass through distribution channels, said Dane Bernard, a vice president of the National Food Processors Association. “We struggle to figure out how to make that part of the system work better,” he said.

Together, the two agencies can document about 3700 recalls since the mid- 1980s for problems ranging from potentially dangerous bacterial contamination to incorrect labeling or excessive water content. The Agriculture Department oversees recalls for meat and poultry, while FDA handles all other food products.

The agencies should provide companies with specific guidelines for issuing and carrying out recalls involving serious health risks and gather more information on how they are handled, including specific dates on which the processor finds out about the problem, starts a recall and then completes it, GAO said.

About half of the 515 recalls counted by USDA and one-fourth of the 3,248 FDA-tracked recalls dealt with serious health risks, such as E. coli O157:H7 or salmonella contamination.

FDA officials were aware of nine cases, dating back to 1988, where companies delayed issuing a recall.

USDA officials said that had never happened in their memory, but GAO cited two cases where investigators said the department was slow or indecisive in pushing a company to issue a recall: The 1997 outbreak of E. coli poisonings linked to a Hudson Foods plant in Nebraska, and a 1998 listeria outbreak traced to a Bil Mar Foods plant in Michigan.

The agencies said they were considering the recommendations. But USDA doesn't think they would “fundamentally help speed up or make the recall process more effective,” an official said in a letter to the investigators.

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