PHOENIX -- The Obama administration intends to increase the number of inspections of foreign food plants from 100 per year to 2,000 per year, a key U.S. Food and Drug Administration official said Jan. 20 in Phoenix.
Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, told the International Dairy Foods Association that the FDA will be looking particularly for listeria in imported cheese products and cases of adulteration, such as dairy products that falsely claim to be made of cow's milk or dairy products from China that might contain melamine. But Sundlof also noted that there are 200,000 foreign plants that make food for the U.S. market and said FDA also will focus on the food safety systems in foreign countries.
FDA is in charge of all food safety except meat, poultry and egg products.
Sundlof also said the Obama administration "fully supports" the food safety bills that are moving through the House and Senate. He said the agency's handling of the contaminated peanut butter case last year would have been faster if provisions in the new bills giving the agency rapid access to company records and requiring product tracing had been in place.
Sundlof said that FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg has directed the agency to improve the "the recovery phase" of food safety scares, a time when officials tell the public that it is safe to eat the food item again.
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Sundlof acknowledged that the agency did not do a good job in the case in which tomatoes were thought to have caused foodborne illness, but imported Mexican peppers turned out to be the problem. Sundlof said that in a recent case involving pistachios, the agency directed consumers to a pistachio industry Web site that told consumers which pistachio products were safe.
