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More FDA Food Safety Inspections – Resources not Laws is the Answer  (no comments)

Posted: Friday, April 9th, 2010

By David Acheson

This week the Health and Human Services Inspector General issued a report indicating a declining number of FDA inspections of food facilities in recent years. The report makes a number of important recommendations including FDA doing more inspections and following up more thoroughly when a problem is found. I have no argument with that logic, FDA does need to do more inspections and have solid follow through on what they find. The report does however have an interesting discrepancy and has triggered the usual cry of “we need regulations to fix this problem”.

The discrepancy is centered on the number of facilities that FDA identified in the IG study as being approximately 51,000 that were subject to inspection, and were in business from 2004-2008. I am curious why this number is so different from the number of domestic firms that are registered with FDA which is almost three times that at approximately 150,000. Have we had a 200% increase in the numbers of firms established since 2004? Is the turnover of food firms that have to be inspected by FDA that great? Or is there a bit of a black hole in terms of who is really out there in the food industry producing food for interstate commerce?

Clearly it is important to update food safety legislation with a greater focus on preventive controls. However, the idea that legislative change is the solution to FDA doing more inspections is not tenable. While new legislation may “require” FDA to do more inspections, the Agency could increase the number of inspections right now if they had the resources. Again the new legislation calls for user fees that would be used to increase the number of FDA inspectors and thus FDA inspections. However, the proposed fee will not begin to cover the level of increased inspection that is really needed for high risk firms.

The IG report does a good job of pointing out some problems that need to be addressed, but let’s not kid ourselves that the proposed food safety legislation is the answer to the current paucity of FDA inspections – it is not, more resources is the answer.