Word: fda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Previous reports have pegged the total cost of foodborne illness at between $6.9 billion and $35 billion, based on past estimates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But those numbers are almost surely based on serious undercounting. Most cases of foodborne illness are never officially reported - for every one case of E. coli that goes into the books, another 20 are undocumented. What's more, the FDA and USDA focus on just a handful of reportable pathogens: E. coli, campylobacter, salmonella and listeria, which excludes the many cases of food poisoning for which...
Rather than relying on such underestimates, the Produce Safety Project study used CDC data showing that there are 76 million new cases of foodborne illness in the U.S. each year. Study author Robert Scharff, a professor at Ohio State University and a former FDA economist, then tried to account for the overall cost of illness, factoring in every expense, from onetime costs for prescription medication to losses in "quality of life" - a dollars-and-cents picture of exactly how miserable that bout with a bad falafel made you. "The study really illustrates just how serious foodborne illness...
...find a food product that has no trace amounts of allergens, even if the main ingredients do not contain them. "Nearly 30% to 40% of food recalls are due to undeclared allergens," says Stefano Luccioli of the Office of Food Additive Safety at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). (See how genes, gender and diet may be life extenders...
Fueling that trend is rapidly evolving technology that helps detect microscopic, seemingly insignificant amounts of allergen protein in foods. Whenever that happens, the FDA can order a recall...
...FDA, for its part, is sticking with its present standards. But discussions are in progress to determine whether thresholds can be established for each allergen, as the E.U. is doing, says Luccioli. "The [current policy] is that there is no such thing as a minimum threshold. If you can detect [allergens], then it's not a safe level," he says...