Goal: A food system the public can trust

As legislation to strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) food safety authorities awaits consideration by the U.S. Senate, we are reminded there is no more fundamental function of government than protecting the public health, and no mission more important to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) than protecting Americans from foodborne illness.  The bottom line is that every parent in America should feel comfortable that the meal they place on the kitchen table will never hurt their child.  

When there is an outbreak of illness due to contaminated food, everyone loses: consumers, industry, and producers. Today, foodborne illness occurs too often, with devastating impacts on the lives of victims and their families. The effects also extend to our economy – driving productivity losses, hurting agricultural businesses, and leading to medical costs estimated at more than $100 billion annually. That is why modernizing our food safety system is a priority for me, for President Obama and for this administration.

{mosads}Shortly after being sworn in, the president created a new Food Safety Working Group, co-chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and me, to upgrade our food safety system for the 21st century. We expect the guidance and leadership of this group to achieve dramatic progress in food safety. We are setting new goals and modernizing the system to meet those goals, so that we can see renewed progress in cutting foodborne illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths.  

The Working Group has already increased cooperation and collaboration between key agencies involved in food safety, and it has focused our attention on making prevention of foodborne illness the central tenet of our food safety system – supported by efforts to strengthen enforcement, and improve the government’s response time when outbreaks occur.  

In line with Food Safety Working Group recommendations, I have instituted a top-to-bottom review of USDA’s food safety efforts, and we are aggressively implementing improvements to our food safety system.  We expanded sampling for E. coli O157:H7, are tightening existing performance standards for salmonella and instituting standards for campylobacter for the first time. The USDA has joined with our federal partners to ensure the safety of imported food, and has re-launched www.FoodSafety.gov to better communicate with the public and provide alerts to consumers about food hazards. We have also taken steps to improve the safety and quality of food products provided to 31 million school children in the National School Lunch Program, including imposing more stringent requirements on suppliers, initiating a review of purchasing specifications, and improving information sharing between government agencies.

But these are just the first steps that USDA is taking to improve our food safety system. And we will not rest until we have made significant progress toward eliminating hospitalizations and deaths due to foodborne illness. That is why we have moved forward with a bold new food safety research initiative, and, later this year, the USDA will launch a dramatically improved surveillance and data collection and analysis system to alert us faster than ever to potential threats in the food supply and help us respond rapidly, enabling us to collaborate more effectively with our state and local partners. Finally, we will continue to bolster our food safety education efforts so the public has the right tools to protect themselves when contamination does occur.  

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control announced that in 2009 we had halved foodborne illnesses due to E. coli O157:H7, a goal set after the 1993 that outbreak sickened hundreds and left four children dead.   While this is a significant achievement, we still have a great deal of work to do to achieve this administration’s vision of a food safety system that brings the number of hospitalizations and deaths due to foodborne illness down to zero.  

In the months and years to come, we will continue to work with our food safety partners across the government, Congress, and industry and consumer stakeholders on transforming our food safety programs into a preventative, 21st century food safety system.  Through coordinated efforts with federal and other partners, I believe we can make important steps towards that goal of creating a food safety system the public can trust for years to come. 

Vilsack is the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture