Obama signs new law on food safety. We say: Just in time!

President Obama yesterday signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act, which will shift the regulatory focus of the Food and Drug Administration from responding to food contamination outbreaks to preventing them. The bill, which won bipartisan support from Congress, will require more frequent inspections of food facilities and, for the first time, also give the FDA the authority to order recalls of tainted food.

"It's a great day for consumers," said Jean Halloran, the director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and ConsumerReportsHealth.org. "When common foods like spinach and peanut products have to be pulled from stores because people are dying, clearly, there's a problem. This legislation will go a long way toward making our food safer."

The new law comes on the heels of a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that appeared to indicate that the food supply had gotten safer over the past decade, although the CDC does say that the figures from 2011 can't be compared to 1999. And our analysis suggests that there's no reason to celebrate—and in fact might underscore the need for the new law.  

The new CDC figures revised downwards the estimated number of annual foodborne illnesses in the U.S. from about 76 million in 1999 to 48 million now. Hospitalizations from contaminated foods declined from about 325,000 to 130,000, and deaths from about 5,000 to 3,000.

But those apparent improvements stem at least in part from the stricter definitions the CDC now uses for "foodborne illnesses." While they used to count any vomiting caused by contaminated food, they now count only vomiting that continues for longer than a day or that restricts normal activities. And they no longer count bouts contracted while traveling overseas.

At least as important, the CDC changed how it calculates the number of foodborne illnesses reported each year. They start by estimating, via a survey, how many people experience cases of acute gastroenteritis—essentially diarrhea or vomiting—and then the percentage of those illnesses that stem from contaminated foods. In 1999, the agency estimated that 79 percent of people in the U.S. had experienced the problem, compared with just 60 percent now. But the current estimate is an average of three surveys—and the most recent one, from 2006 and 2007, found that 73 percent of people had suffered the problem. If the CDC had used that most recent figure, rather than the lower average one, the total cases of annual foodborne illnesses  wouldhave actually gone up, perhaps to 55.5 million cases.

In addition, the CDC also lowered the percentage of cases of acute gastroenteritis attributed to food. It used to assume that 40 percent of norovirus infections—the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis in this country—stemmed from food. But it's now lowered that to 26 percent, substantially reducing the total number of estimated foodborne illnesses overall.

Finally, both the 1999 report and the most recent one had large margins of error and other statistical uncertainties.

Bottom line: It's unclear whether food safety has improved much if at all in the past decade. Which means that we still have a significant food-safety problem. Which means that the new law has come none too soon.

 —Michael Hansen, Ph.D., senior research associate

Read more about food safety in the grocery store and for bagged salads and chicken. And read about what Consumers Union is doing to keep food safe.

 

—Joel Keehn