FDA Recalls

Issues with the Food and Drug Administration

The FDA is an administration that should protect and promote public health through the supervision of food and drug production, but in recent years the FDA has failed to provide a high enough standard which protects US citizens. The FDA failed to regulate a non-sanitary farm that resulted in an egg recall of over half a billion eggs after contaminating several people with the salmonella virus. To be exact 1,500 people were infected with salmonella. After all of these people got sick, the F.D.A finally decided to take a walk through the farm where these eggs came from. They found that the farm, Wright County Egg in Iowa, had many sanitation problems. The farm contained an 8-foot tall pile of feces, rats, and maggots in the farm. This is absolutely disgusting and shouldn’t have been found AFTER the eggs were released into stores. Then again a few years ago there was a problem with contaminated spinach and again the F.D.A. hadn’t caught it before it happened. Many manufacturers were opposed to the F.D.A being given much authority but now that this has happened a few times they have come to support it. The F.D.A. aren’t even the ones to decide to issue a recall, recalls are voluntary. I read in the AAFP news article that congress is starting to consider ways to improve the authority of the F.D.A. because they haven’t been given enough authority to live up to their expectation of keeping the country safe from bad food and drug production. It states, “The legislation that Congress is currently considering would give us that authority and other critical tools, such as enhanced authorities to trace back products to the source, to require firms to implement preventive controls, and to provide FDA access to important records. It would also strengthen our abilities to ensure the safety of foods being imported into the United States." I don’t really understand why the F.D.A doesn’t have these authorities already if they’re the ones who are supposed to be protecting the country in general. But I guess since they don’t have the authority now, the only thing the country can do is give it to them for the future. I hope the F.D.A will start living up to their expectations because if they don’t there’s no point in having them at all.

Jonathan