FDA Takes Food Safety Seriously With Electronic Reporting System

Michael Causey, Editor & Publisher, eDataIntegrityReport.com

Is it just me, or does it seem like someone must have reminded the FDA that the first part of its name starts with the word “Food”? In the past several weeks we’ve seen a very public and very aggressive FDA take some big steps to assure consumers that their food is safe after a bad year or two out there in America’s food chain. Remember lettuce? Beef? Tomatoes? The list goes on and on and…

The latest FDA action is the launch of a Reportable Food Registry (RFR) which requires that facilities that manufacture, process or hold food for consumption in the US now must tell the FDA within 24 hours if they find a reasonable probability that an article of food will cause severe health problems or death to a person or an animal.

The FDA rolled it all out with a big press event Sept 8 – the same day that reporting this way becomes the law of the land, said Michael Taylor, Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner on food issues. It will “provide a reliable mechanism” for the FDA to track patterns in food problems and help it act more quickly to fix them. “It’s an important step,” Taylor said. “Our first priority is to prevent food safety problems.”

(It doesn’t include infant formula or dietary supplements, those have separate reporting requirements already on the books.)

This latest FDA move is all part of a wider effort, spearheaded by HHS and USDA, which also just unveiled a new consumer web site: www.foodsafety.gov. It’s designed to help consumers get the latest info on food safety and recalls.

The new site will feature information from all the agencies across the federal government that deal with critical food and food safety information, including preventive tips about how to handle food safely, alerts on life-saving food recalls, and the latest news from the key agencies.

Click here for a copy of ”Food for Thought: The FDA Gets Serious on Electronic Records Management”.