Egg Recall Hatches More Regulations

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

We already had regulations in place which kept us "safe..."

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously declared back in the salad days of the Obama administration. The head of the Food Drug Administration (FDA), Margaret Hamburg, is paying heed to Emanuel’s maxim, using the recall of a half billion eggs to argue for giving her agency more power over food. The agency has traced the recent uptick in salmonella infections to eggs. Citing this recall, Hamburg is urging the U.S. Senate to pass the Food Safety Enhancement Act, which the House of Representatives passed last summer.

So is the egg recall a “serious crisis”? Well, the unfortunate citizens immiserated by diarrhea and nausea from eating contaminated eggs will have obvious reasons to think so. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s foodborne illness surveillance system finds since 1998 that rates of infection in 2009 were lower for Shigella (55 percent decrease), Yersinia (53 percent decrease), STEC O157 (41 percent decrease), Campylobacter (30 percent decrease), Listeria (26 percent decrease), and Salmonella (10 percent decrease); rates were higher for Vibrio (85 percent increase).

So why all the hullabaloo about food safety at a time when our food is less likely than ever to make us sick? The decline in foodborne illnesses was taking place even as media reports on food safety grew from about 22,000 reports in 1998 to over 60,000 last year. It’s not at all surprising that this increase in news coverage, spotlighting foodborne illness in spinach, tomatoes, peanuts, and deli meats, has fueled consumer anxiety over food safety.

While the incidence of foodborne illness appears to be decreasing, might further government regulation speed up that decline and so protect public health? There are reasons to doubt it.

The Food Safety Enhancement Act would dramatically increase the FDA’s role in regulating food production in the United States. The legislation would require some 378,000 food preparation facilities to pay an annual $500 fee to register with the FDA, to keep voluminous records about their safety systems, and be subject to FDA-approved inspections every year or two.

In addition, the act authorizes the Health and Human Services Department to establish an elaborate tracing system that enables the agency to identify each person who grows, produces, manufactures, processes, packs, transports, holds, or sells food in as short a timeframe as practicable but no longer than two business days. Only farmers who sell directly to consumers, fishing vessels, and grain producers would be exempt from the full traceability requirements. The new law would increase the criminal (up to 10 years in prison) and civil penalties ($7.5 million) for violating the new regulations.

The new law would enable the FDA to more widely impose hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) regulations on food producers and processors. HACCP plans attempt to ensure food safety by elaborate monitoring and verification procedures, all copiously documented. The Washington, D.C.-based free-market think tank the Mercatus Institute notes that HACCP regulations were imposed on the seafood industry by the FDA in the mid-1990s. The goal was to reduce the incidence of the saltwater pathogen Vibrio in seafood, yet the CDC FoodNet finds that Vibrio is the only pathogen whose rate of infection has increased since 1998 (admittedly there were only 160 reported cases in 2009).

A 2009 analysis in the Review of Agricultural Economics by U.S. Department of Agriculture economist Michael Ollinger and Washington State University economist Danna Moore finds that costly HACCP regulations end up favoring larger food producers and processors. This is not surprising since only big companies have the resources to cope with the growing burden of federal regulations.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/08/24/egg-recall-hatches-more-regula

Which, of course, leads to...

~*drumrollllllllllllllllll*~

TOO BIG TOO FAIL! (Evil Big Egg redux - The Bête Noire of Unintended Consequences)

Of course, THESE regulations will keep us "safe."
__________________
How can you measure the value of knowing that company books are sounder than they were before? Of no more overnight bankruptcies with the employees and retirees left holding the bag? No more disruption to entire sectors of the economy?
Michael Oxley 2002
Co-Author of Sarbanes-Oxley Law

It will take the next economic crisis, as certainly it will come, to determine whether or not the provisions of this bill will actually provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis.
Chris Dodd
Co-Author Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act

 

[Saint Peter]

It is wrong to eat eggs.

There are baby chickens inside of those things.

 

[ivantheterrible]

i don't see what the problem is. as long as you don't eat them raw.

cook well, and wash your hands after handling the shells.