040315 FDA Head: More Food Inspection Needed

Washington - The Food and Drug Administration, which works to ensure imported food is safe, is inspecting only about 1 percent of imports and needs to improve, the agency's acting commissioner said.

The FDA is overwhelmed by imports, which have increased fivefold since 1994, said Dr. Lester Crawford, the acting commissioner.

"It's difficult for us, and we are missing the mark, but we pledge to do better," Crawford told a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on agriculture Thursday.

Americans eat on average about 2,000 pounds of imported food a year -- 11 percent of everything they eat, according to Agriculture Department statistics. Last year, they ran up a bill of $50.1 billion on imports, said Mark Gehlar, a senior economist at the Agriculture Department.

The FDA is responsible for inspections of most types of food imports. The Agriculture Department is responsible for meat, poultry and egg products.

The FDA has added 600 food inspectors under the Bioterrorism Act of 2002, and this should help, Crawford told reporters after the hearing. The law requires exporters to give the United States advance notice of shipments. And the FDA is using the law to give priority to inspections of shipments that could have higher risk of carrying disease, he said.

However, Crawford said much of the safety work still must be done in the exporting country. Foreign government workers typically check on food safety of their farms and processing plants, but U.S. officials sometimes visit to review whether the products meet U.S. standards.

Disease-producing imports sometimes enter the United States anyway. In November, three people died and more than 600 were sickened after eating tainted green onions at a Pittsburgh-area Chi-Chi's restaurant. It was the largest single-source outbreak of the liver disease in the nation's history.

After the outbreak, officials of the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inspected farms and processors in Mexico, investigating how the green onions became contaminated. Crawford said the investigation "is still progressing."

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