Moving swiftly in the wake of an ominous warning from Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson concerning vulnerabilities in the nation’s food supply, the Food and Drug Administration issued new regulations Monday enhancing record keeping of the country’s food stock.
The regulations will require all persons importing, processing, packing, transporting, distributing, receiving, holding or manufacturing food to maintain records identifying what source the food came from and where it will go in the future.
The regulation stems from the Bioterrorism Act passed following multiple anthrax attacks in 2002.
FDA Commissioner Dr. Lester Crawford said in a statement the new regulation will be essential in helping the FDA track food contaminated by a possible terrorist attack.
“These records will be crucial for FDA to deal effectively with food-related emergencies, such as deliberate contamination of food by terrorists,” Crawford said. “The ability to trace back will enable us to get to the source of contamination.”
All businesses handling food must comply with the order in the next 12 months. Small businesses will be allowed a longer time period to transition to the new record-keeping system.
Should the FDA establish reasonable belief that a food supply has been tainted, businesses must make their records available within 24 hours of the administration’s official request. Failure to maintain the records will subject businesses to criminal and civil penalties under the Bioterrorism Act.
In announcing his resignation from President George Bush’s Cabinet Friday, Thompson warned of dangerous lapses in the country’s ability to deal with potential terrorist attacks on the food supply. The departing secretary said he worries every night about such a contamination of food imported from the Middle East.
The FDA’s new regulations move toward better protection of the nation’s food supply, the former Wisconsin governor said in a statement Monday.
“Publication of this record-keeping rule represents a milestone in U.S. food safety and security,” Thompson said. “There is more work to do yet, but our nation is now more prepared than ever before to protect the public against threats to the food supply.”
The U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, employs more than 7,600 inspectors at food plants and entry ports daily to prevent food-safety emergencies.
University of Wisconsin political science professor Jon Pevehouse said it is difficult to determine how vulnerable the United States is to a biological attack but noted the issue has not received much attention in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
“[Thompson’s comments] were a bit surprising because the issue [has] not gotten a lot of attention,” Pevehouse said.
Still, Pevehouse said another suicide bombing — and not a large-scale biological attack — remains a greater threat to the United States.
“It’s unclear what [Thompson] had in mind per se, but biological agents can be difficult to do on a mass scale,” Pevehouse said. “It’s something that probably does need more attention, but there were other priorities after 9/11. On the priority list of securing airlines and ports, [protecting the food supply] would come below that.”
