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FDA Fails to Reach State Food Safety Audit Targets
By Caroline Scott (Nutringredients.com)
May 07, 2009
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has taken another blow as a US news organization published figures on Thursday showing it is failing to meet its goals for auditing individual states’ food safety inspections.
The FDA aims to audit at least seven percent of food safety inspections that are carried out by state authorities on its behalf, in order to ensure they come up to a satisfactory standard. But it only reached that goal in 17 of the 39 states it paid to carry out inspections during the 2007-08 audit year, according to a USA Today report.
The efficacy of state inspections came under scrutiny earlier this year during the salmonella outbreak linked to peanut products from a Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) plant in Blakely, Georgia.
Speaking in a conference call with reporters in January, the FDA’s Michael Rogers said that the federal agency had not inspected the contaminated plant in 2007 or 2008, but had contracted inspections out to Georgia state officials. Those inspections found only a few violations at the facility, even though the PCA’s internal food safety assessments found the presence of salmonella at least twelve times.
FDA improvement
The USA Today report said that FDA’s figures for auditing food safety inspections have improved, however. In the 2006-07 audit year, it did not meet its seven percent target in 21 of 37 states, and there were no audits at all in eight states. Moreover, in 1998, the FDA carried out no audits in 21 of 38 states.
