Food Importers Find Ways Around FDA Screening / Investigators Tell Congress About Problem; Lawmakers Criticize Agency Plan to Close Half Its Labs

By ANDREW BRIDGES

Importers have learned to evade close federal scrutiny of the food they ship into the United States, putting consumers at increasing risk, congressional investigators said yesterday.

Lawmakers also criticized the Food and Drug Administration’s plan to close half of its laboratories.

They called that idea misguided and questioned whether it would save money and help the agency target unsafe food, as FDA commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach said it would.

“FDA’s ill-conceived decision to close seven of its 13 laboratories likely would expose American consumers to even more danger from unsafe foods, particularly imports,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., at a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce subcommittee on the FDA and food safety.

The FDA’s ability to police the nation’s food supply has come under withering criticism from Congress and others amid a string of high-profile cases of foodborne illness, including E. coli-tainted spinach and salmonella-contaminated peanut butter and snack foods, as well as concerns about drug-laced, farmed fish imported from China.

Von Eschenbach said the lab plan was meant to modernize the FDA’s food safety efforts. He cited as an outdated practice the FDA’s spending of taxpayer money on seafood that’s now brought back to the lab and sniffed for freshness.

“I want to make it very clear this is intended for one purpose and one purpose only and that is to bring FDA’s laboratory infrastructure into the 21st century,” von Eschenbach said.

An Energy and Commerce Committee investigation found the FDA now has little ability to police imports.

In San Francisco, the FDA’s staff can conduct only a cursory review of imports, generally dedicating just 30 seconds to each shipment as it flashes by on a computer screen, according to investigators.

Even when products are flagged by the FDA, importers have learned to game the system, investigators said.

For example, the FDA relies on results obtained from private labs before clearing and releasing suspect imports, including Chinese farmed seafood. But those labs produce results driven by financial rather than scientific concerns, investigators told the subcommittee.

“You’re saying the importers know how to maneuver around the FDA?” asked Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa.

“Yes,” committee senior investigator David Nelson said.

Some potentially problematic seafood imports are being steered to enter the country in Las Vegas to avoid the scrutiny they might receive in San Francisco and other West Coast seaports, according to Nelson and other investigators.

The problems go beyond food.

In Puerto Rico, investigators learned importers were getting around the FDA’s blocking of imports of Chinese-made toothpaste made with an antifreeze ingredient by co-packaging them with toothbrushes. Once labeled in import records simply as “toothbrushes,” the packages were able to slip past the FDA until the agency caught on, Nelson said.

ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO

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