Food Safety Gets Barely Ten Minutes at the Hearing for the FDA Commissioner Nominee

The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) held a confirmation hearing on September 24 for the nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration. Although the FDA regulates most of the country's food supply, food safety took up about ten minutes of a two-hour hearing, and ten of the committee's 16 members did not mention the subject, according to coverage by a specialized outlet. Most of the questions focused on vaccines and drugs.

One senator raised this summer's Cyclospora outbreak and the number of recalls, and asked the nominee whether she knew the staffing levels of the FDA's Human Foods Program and of the unit that investigates outbreaks; the nominee answered that she did not. Another senator asked about the agency's resources for reviewing additives under the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) pathway, and the nominee admitted they are not sufficient; she also spoke in favor of greater uniformity among state food laws.

Other topics came up briefly: the use of the word milk for plant-based beverages, the labeling of genetically modified salmon, and one senator's concern about federal funding cuts to state and local food safety programs, which carry out a good part of the inspections and field work in outbreaks. A different senator was the one who devoted the most time to outbreak investigations and recalls.

For TAAG, the hearing sends a signal to industry: if federal capacity for outbreak investigation and inspection does not grow, early pathogen detection will rely more and more on companies' own self-monitoring programs, which makes it all the more important to have in-house microbiological monitoring that is traceable and fast at the plant.