January 26, 2010

US to increase food inspections on imported dairy products

The US government has intentions to increase the number of inspections of foreign food plants from 100 per year to 2,000 per year.

Stephen Sundlof, director of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Centre for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, told the International Dairy Foods Association that the FDA will be looking particularly for listeria in imported cheese products, and cases of adulteration, such as dairy products from China that might contain melamine.

FDA is in charge of all food safety except meat, poultry and egg products.

The Obama administration fully supports the food safety bills that are moving through the House and Senate, Sundlof said.

He said the agency's handling of the contaminated peanut butter case last year would have been faster, if provisions in the new bills giving the agency rapid access to company records and requiring product tracing had been in place.

Sundlof said that FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg has directed the agency to improve the "the recovery phase" of food safety scares, a time when officials tell the public that it is safe to eat the food item again.