Food Safety consumer groups are really weighing in on what the Obama Administration should be doing. The Institute of Medicine today stated that the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety system remains ill-equipped to meet emerging challenges, and the legal authority underlying all government inspection programs should be updated to emphasize prevention of foodborne illness. …

I was reading Dr. Brackett’s “Grading Progress on Food Safety” in the New York Times. Here are his thoughts below:

The Grocery Manufacturers Associations agrees with your assessment that the Food and Drug Administration should be given more resources and authority to prevent contamination of the nation’s food supplies.

Once in office, President-elect Barack Obama…

The occurrence of bacterial infection is a function of several major variables: (1) the virulence of the bacterial pathogen, that is, its ability to cause severe disease; (2) how the pathogen is transmitted to the “host”—for example, whether it is airborne, foodborne, blood borne, etc.; and (3) host susceptibility—i.e. how well the host can defend itself against the bacterial pathogen. Increased susceptibility, in turn, may result from two different processes: a bigger infectious dose in a given case of disease may cause a more severe infection, and physical characteristics particular to an individual host may render him or her less able to limit the spread of infectious microorganisms from the intestinal tract to the bloodstream.

Morbidity and mortality in the elderly from infectious disease is far greater than in other populations. For instance, death rates for infectious diarrheal disease alone are five times higher in people over 74 years of age than in the next highest group, children under four years of age, and fifteen times higher than the rates seen in younger adults. Published studies attribute the elderly’s heightened risks, both of infection and mortality due to enteric infectious disease, to several factors: (1) the aging of the gastrointestinal tract (reduced gastric acidity/reduced gastric mobility); (2) a higher prevalence of underlying medical disorders (co-morbidity factors); and (3) malnutrition and a decline in the immune response that leaves the host less able to defend itself against infectious agents.Continue Reading The Significance of Age in Bacterial Infection

On September 12, 2008, the Chinese government officially announced that China’s powdered milk supply was experiencing a contamination problem. An initial recall, announced the same day, of over 700 tons of infant formula signaled to the world that this was no minor incident. Even so, few people would have imagined that we would sit here…

Our Government (National Agricultural Library) does not think so, and I agree.  Click on the below, you may never find your way back out again.

According to today’s Washington Post, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seeking to rescind its warning that women and children should limit their intake of fish, given widespread mercury contamination. The FDA is now espousing the view that the benefits of consuming fish outweigh the risks of neurological damage and mercury’s other harms &ndash…

I was traveling somewhere on a case last week when I was struck by the media focus on “Oprah’s see-saw battle of the bulge.”  Hmmm, I thought… I have been practicing law for 20 years now – 15 of which have been food poisoning cases.  During that time, I have cut back on my…