The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that the U.S. food supply is still “one of the safest in the world,” as several outbreaks of foodborne illnesses have affected goods ranging from organic carrots for meat deli for McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. E. coli, listeria and other contaminants have sickened thousands of people and forced several recalls in the new month.
But despite these high-profile examples, data cited by the FDA suggest recalls were not generally high last year.
For the fiscal year that ended in September, there were 179 recalls that the agency’s food and cosmetics body classified as the most risky problems, such as potential contamination with unknown bacteria or allergens.
This is up from 145 high-risk recalls in 2023, but less than the 185 the agency recorded in 2022. There were 167 high-risk recalls in 2019.
The classification includes a recall of tens of thousands of cases of onions processed by Taylor Farms that were withdrawn earlier this fall, after officials suspected they were to blame for the deadly incident. E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounder burger that has been sick more than a hundred people.
“Our main goal is for the industry to do its part to ensure that the food introduced to the market does not be blamed or misbranded. Recalls help get food from the market quickly if there is a problem. Outbreak advisories provide important food safety information to the public,” an FDA spokesperson said in a statement.
The spokesperson also shared a report by The Economist that measures global food security. The US food supply is “one of the safest in the world” and ranks “first overall for food security indicators in 2022,” the spokesman said.
In fact, the FDA suggests, the number of recalls is an indicator that a safety system is working.
“The occurrence of recalls and outbreaks means that manufacturers, importers and distributors are monitoring problems and taking action when they detect problems,” said an FDA spokesperson.
Diseases increase in CDC data – but so do tests
Figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show the number of high-profile recalls has increased from last year, although not by much.
So far this year, 10 “multistate foodborne outbreak notifications” have been issued by the CDC. Last year there were nine news. There were 24 notices issued in 2018, the most in any year in the past decade.
Infections from foodborne outbreaks like Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, or STEC, have risen by at least 13,962 this year, the CDC tally noted.
About 13,140 were reported by the health department last year and 12,119 were reported in 2019.
Foodborne illness linked to other germs has also climbed throughout the country in recent years, reports by the CDC’s FoodNet system suggest, although improvements in how patients are tested for these germs can help explain some of the increase.
“Laboratory technology changes and affects what we see in surveillance data. When laboratory tests become faster, become more specific, become better in other ways. It makes the data a little less comparable, “Sharon Shea, senior director of security of food at the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told CBS News.
Shea, who also works as a microbiologist in a hospital lab as well as a public health lab, said the public health department and doctors’ response to foodborne outbreaks has also improved.
Some of that is a time-saving shift to “molecular-based” panel tests that hospitals and clinical laboratories can perform for a variety of germs, rather than the one-off tests for specific pathogens, which were introduced after 2012.
Labs in the CDC-led PulseNet network have also switched to “whole-genome sequencing,” Shea said — a more accurate approach to pinpointing unique genetic fingerprints that can link multiple cases together for investigators. These connections could be important in finding common foods eaten by sick people during outbreaks.
“The most preventable deaths are unnecessary”
Food safety advocates outside of government say the U.S. still has a lot of room to improve food safety.
“It doesn’t make sense to say ‘Americans have the safest food in the world’ when people are dying baby carrots“said Sarah Sorscher, chief of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Sorscher acknowledged that the public health department has gotten better at investigating outbreaks, but warned that still only a small fraction of foodborne illnesses are solved.
“Public health systems are getting better at dealing with outbreaks because of advances in genome sequencing and artificial intelligence, so it’s possible we’re seeing more of an iceberg than a few years ago,” he said.
Staff shortages and breakdowns in food safety have also led to a decrease in the number of recalls and reporting of illnesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sorscher said.
“Our food supply is not as safe as it was five years ago. Anyone who has gone to the grocery store or checked the refrigerator to see the onions and carrots in the produce drawer that are the subject of the latest recall knows that,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government relations at the Working Group. Non-profit environment.
Faber pointed to previous reports tracking a rebound in food recalls after 2020, based on data from the FDA as well as the US Department of Agriculture.
Inspections of food facilities by the FDA fall short of congressional mandates, the Environmental Working Group says. He also criticized the agency for not requiring testing of irrigation water sprayed on crops, which could pose a risk of contamination from nearby animal feeding operations.
“It’s no different than washing your hands or not cutting vegetables on the same cutting board as chicken, just common sense measures to reduce the risk of foodborne illness. And this is the most preventable and unnecessary death imaginable,” said Faber.
