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New Report: Trump’s Food Safety Cutbacks Are Making Americans Sick

A new report from Defend America Action draws a direct line between the Trump administration slashing food safety enforcement and the growing number of Americans getting sick with foodborne illnesses.

More than 15,000 Americans have contracted cyclosporiasis in recent months, a type of food poisoning that causes low-grade fevers and painful diarrhea. The outbreak has been traced to iceberg lettuce. In August, multiple store-bought guacamoles were recalled because of potential salmonella contamination.

This has been a growing trend in President Donald Trump’s second term. Last year, 25 people were hospitalized and six died after contracting listeria from ready-to-eat pasta products. In total, the federal government failed to identify the source for 13 of the 28 foodborne illness outbreaks reported last year.

“As families spent this summer wondering what was safe to put on the dinner table, everyone is wondering what happened to the safeguards designed to protect our food supply,” the report says.

Issues of food safety and public health are generally managed by three federal agencies: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

All of these agencies were dramatically downsized by DOGE, the White House initiative that slashed workforces across the federal government. The FDA lost 3,859 employees and the USDA lost 19,984, including 874 workers at its Food Safety and Inspection Service.

The White House insisted food safety inspectors were not included in the firings, but the gutting of support staff still contributed to a growing backlog of uninspected food producers. The farm linked to the cyclosporiasis outbreak, for example, had not been inspected for seven years.

As for the CDC under Trump, it narrowed the foodborne pathogens it monitors from six to two. Cyclosporiasis and listeria are among the pathogens no longer being tracked.

“FDA inspections are the first line of defense for mitigating contamination outbreaks,” the report continues, noting that this applies to both domestic and imported products.

Food borne illnesses are also affecting the economy. USDA data suggests that food borne illnesses cost Americans $75 billion a year in medical care, lost productivity, and premature deaths before Trump started eliminating safeguards. Now, that figure seems poised to grow.

According to a CBS poll, 40 percent of Americans are buying and eating less produce of all brands and varieties, not just those impacted by cyclosporiasis. A separate poll found that a majority of Americans have little or no confidence in government oversight of food safety.

“Even though Trump and his allies promised to ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” the report says, “his administration has made it harder to find out what is making Americans sick.”

Reprinted with permission from American Journal News

This Week In Health: Close The Fridge And Go Outside

“This Week In Health” offers some highlights from the world of health news and wellness tips that you may have missed this week:

Southern Comfort Makes Y’All Sicker: A new analysis of eating patterns has identified the Southern United States as having the most dangerous eating habits for heart health. The study, conducted by the University of Alabama, identified six common food choices that characterized the Southern diet, including sugary drinks, fatty and fried foods, processed meats, and organ meats. All are known to contribute to poor health. The lead researcher for the project recommends those following the Southern diet stop doing so.

Don’t Get Expired: New tech looks to answer an age-old question: Does this look okay to you? Scientists from around the world have been developing surefire ways to determine if milk, eggs, fish, and vegetables have expired — regardless of what the dubious date printed on the food might say.

Doctors Urge Individuals To Get More Vitamin D : Doctors have started recommending Vitamin D supplements as a critical part of a healthy lifestyle. Although maintaining a good diet and getting enough sunlight should produce sufficient Vitamin D, recent trends have shown that deficiency has reached a new high of 1 in every 5 adults, as well as 1 in every 6 children. A lack of Vitamin D is associated with a series of problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and multiple sclerosis.

Should Red Tape Trump Innovation? The debate between scientific research and regulation continues to rage, on a new front: The discovery of an enzyme called CRISPR-Cas9 opened new avenues for genetic research, including altering embryonic DNA. Chinese scientists attempted the latter last year, prompting condemnation from around the world. The international nature of the scientific community makes these new frontiers difficult to navigate, and even harder to regulate. Cultural values, religious influence, and political structures all impact how progress will proceed — and which countries will be successful.

Photo by Kurman Communications via Flickr

California Poultry Giant To Shift Away From Using Antibiotics In Its Poultry

By Geoffrey Mohan, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

California poultry giant Foster Farms has joined the flock of meat companies eschewing the use of antibiotics, pledging to eliminate all those used to combat infection in humans.

The company’s promise comes ahead of Tuesday’s White House forum on the use of antibiotics, and amid rising concern that use of the drugs to raise livestock has aided the proliferation of resistant strains of bacteria among humans.

More than 2 million people in the U.S. are infected with such strains annually, and at least 23,000 die as a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Our company is committed to responsible growing practices that help preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics for human health and medicine,” Foster Farms Chief Executive and President Ron Foster said.

Although over-prescription of antibiotics to humans has been a long-term driver of drug-resistant strains, antibiotic use for animals also has been linked to resistant strains of salmonella and campylobacter.

Foster Farms introduced two new antibiotic-free product lines in April: Certified Organic and Simply Raised.

The company has eliminated all antibiotics that the U.S. Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration deem critical to human medicine, said company spokesman Ira Brill.

“We have a long-term goal of fully eliminating all antibiotics that are used in the practice of human medicine,” he said.

Brill said he could not offer a timeline for a complete elimination of antibiotics that also are prescribed to humans. “I don’t think we can put a date on that except to say that we are aggressively working towards that goal,” he said.

The company is researching alternative practices to improve overall flock health, Brill said. “As you continue to improve bird health, then your need for antibiotics declines,” he said.

ConAgra to pay $11.2 million to settle salmonella criminal case

Foster’s change of heart about antibiotics follows shifts away from use of human antibiotics by fellow poultry giant Perdue, as well as retail food chains McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle and Panera, among others.

The CEO of Sanderson Farms, however, told the Wall Street Journal recently that he has no plans to move away from antibiotics.

Consumer pressure for antibiotics-free meat has intensified over the last several years. Sales of organic beef, pork, poultry and fish increased 11 percent from 2012 to 2013, to $675 million, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group pushing to limit use of the drugs.

Jonathan Kaplan, director of the group’s food and agriculture program, credited Foster Farms for being “on track and heading in the right direction.”

But the company’s announcement “is not quite as robust as what Perdue has already accomplished or what Tyson has pledged to do,” Kaplan said. “They still have committed to moving away from the medically important antibiotics, and that’s the main concern.”

About a third of the broiler chickens produced now are raised with tight restrictions on antibiotic use, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“We definitely feel like we are hitting a tipping point for antibiotic stewardship in the poultry industry,” Kaplan said. “This is more than a microtrend. This is a tsunami.”

Foster Farms, which employs about 12,000 people nationally and has sales of $2.7 billion, is based in Livingston, Calif., about 65 miles east of San Jose, and operates five production facilities in the state as well as numerous ranches.

The company has battled back from a 2013 outbreak of salmonella that sickened hundreds of people in 2013, as well as a more recent cockroach infestation and rash of food safety citations at its Livingston plant.

Since then, it has revamped its food safety procedures. Measured salmonella prevalence on poultry at Foster facilities is now well below USDA and industrywide standards, Brill said.

“If you look back on the food safety issues, that was an area where we probably satisfied ourselves with being average — and we realized you cannot lead in a lot of areas if you don’t lead in all areas,” Brill said. “Right now, consumers can look at Foster Farms as about the safest chickens you can buy.”

Photo: No more drugs in your food? Major win. Creativity103 via Flickr

New Food Agency? Hold The Hysteria

As things now stand, the U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees steaks, chicken thighs and eggs out of their shells. The Food and Drug Administration keeps an eye on salmon, apples and eggs in their shells.

Fifteen government entities now supervise food safety, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (seafood).

President Obama wants to consolidate all these food-monitoring functions in a yet-to-be-created Food Safety Administration. Makes sense.

It’s not unusual to find inspectors from several agencies trooping through the same processing plants and other facilities. Some duplicate what others are doing — or don’t do what they think others are doing — or do what the person who came through the week before could have done. Streamlining food safety could also save the taxpayers and consumers some money.

This could be done with no loss — and perhaps some improvement — in this country’s admirable food safety record. But that may not stop food alarmists from sowing panic. There’s a business in spreading fear about what we eat, often promoting myths of danger — much as the anti-vaccination movement has done.

And there are government employees who see their jobs as threatened. Of Obama’s proposal, a USDA inspector and the head of a government meat inspectors union complained, “This would drag us down to (the FDA’s) minuscule standards.”

What a good opportunity to revisit the non-existent mad cow crisis of 10 years ago. Mad cow disease affects the animal’s brain and spinal cord. Americans don’t generally eat those parts, which is one reason the few who died from the infected cows were mostly Europeans.

The other reason is that almost no American cow had the disease. At the time of maximum hysteria, only one cow, in Washington state, was found to be infected — and it had come from Canada.

Nonetheless, columnist Paul Krugman spoke of a “declining credibility of U.S. food regulation” and asked, “How did America find itself back in The Jungle?” That was a reference to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of Chicago meat processors.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, wrote that mad cow disease “confronts the United States with perhaps its most serious and complex food-safety threat.”

Actually, no one — not one person — had ever contracted the human variant of mad cow disease by eating from an American cow before then (or has since). But in a 2004 op-ed for The New York Times, Schlosser jumped all over the USDA secretary’s spokeswoman for issuing a press release titled “Mad Cow Disease Not a Problem in the U.S.”

This was not about reality, not any more than are the reports of vaccines causing profound mental disorders in children.

If one dislikes the aesthetics of industrialized food production, if one objects to mistreatment of many farm animals, if one does not care to eat meat — we hear you. But keep the arguments honest. They are rarely about food safety.

For the record, fruits and vegetables typically account for twice as many cases of food poisoning in this country as does meat, according to the CDC. In recent years, though 29 percent of the foodborne illnesses leading to death have come from eating meat, 23 percent have been tied to produce.

Americans aren’t great at assessing risks. Social media magnify the significance of anecdotes, and many stories, even untrue ones, go viral because they are colorful.

Any plans to change the system for keeping food safe will bring out a variety of economic interests. Bear in mind that some of the economic interests have nothing to do with food production.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Czarina Alegre via Flickr

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

New Report: Trump’s Food Safety Cutbacks Are Making Americans Sick

This Week In Health: Close The Fridge And Go Outside

California Poultry Giant To Shift Away From Using Antibiotics In Its Poultry

New Food Agency? Hold The Hysteria

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