Senators: Give FDA new food-safety tools

The bipartisan bill, whose sponsors include Amy Klobuchar, is less sweeping than a House plan to split the Food and Drug Administration.

By DAVID SHAFFER, Star Tribune

Last update: March 4, 2009 - 12:08 PM

A bipartisan group of eight U.S. senators proposed changes Tuesday in government food safety programs in the wake of the salmonella outbreak in peanut products that sickened 677 people, nine of whom died.

The bill, whose sponsors include Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., calls for increased inspections of food-processing plants and would require every plant to have a food-hazard prevention plan subject to federal review. Inspectors would gain expanded, though not unlimited, access to company test results for salmonella and other pathogens.

Four Republicans co-sponsored the bill, including Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the leading peanut-growing state and site of a Peanut Corp. of America processing plant linked to the outbreak.

Klobuchar said the bill would give the Food and Drug Administration immediate tools to improve food safety. She said she would support broader reforms after the Obama administration appoints an FDA commissioner and lays out its food-safety policy.

"We wanted to do something quicker than that," she said. "We believe this measure has the best chance of passing. ... It is very pragmatic."

It is less sweeping than a House measure that would split the FDA and create one agency to oversee food safety and another to regulate drugs and medical devices.

"You have got 58 Democratic votes," said David Plunkett, senior staff attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food safety advocacy group. "To get something through the Senate you have to have a bipartisan bill. Senator Durbin has done the math."

Plunkett said that under the Senate bill, inspectors wouldn't gain routine access to processing plants' internal test results. At the PCA plant in Blakely, Ga., FDA inspectors discovered after the outbreak that the company's products had tested positive for salmonella 12 times in 2007 and 2008. The FDA invoked a bioterrorism law to get the company to turn over the records. This is not an issue in Minnesota because state law gives state inspectors access to such records.

The bill also would give the FDA authority to order mandatory recalls of food products if companies don't act voluntarily and to set standards for safety of fresh produce, a frequent source of E. coli outbreaks.

More than 2,800 products containing ingredients supplied by Peanut Corp. of America have been recalled in the salmonella outbreak. In Minnesota, 42 people have been sickened. Three of the nine deaths linked to the outbreak occurred in Brainerd, Minn., nursing homes that served contaminated peanut butter.

David Shaffer • 612-673-7090