Victims blame FDA for food-recall failures

In fairness, the insatiable lust for cutting taxes has left many government agencies underfunded and shorthanded to the point that they cannot do their jobs effectively. Christine Haughney reports in Politico:

People had been getting sick from eating I.M. Healthy Original Creamy SoyNut Butter for more than two months when Peter Ebb, a 59-year-old Boston lawyer and health enthusiast, went for a run and then ate his usual gluten-free English muffin smeared with soy nut butter.

Later that morning — March 6, 2017 — Ebb saw a message from Amazon, which had sold him the nut butter, that the manufacturer had recalled it for contamination by E. coli bacteria. Ebb threw away a protein drink he had made with the soy nut butter, but didn’t worry too much. The Food and Drug Administration warning that was linked to the email was worded very cautiously: Though serious illnesses might result, even potentially leading to death, “most healthy adults can recover completely within a week.”

Six days later, Ebb was hospitalized and developed a deadly type of kidney failure. Within days, doctors told his wife to send for their children in case they needed to bid him a last goodbye. He survived, but remains unable to work full time and has trouble climbing the stairs. Now, he’s joining with 18 other victims to file claims against the companies responsible and call attention to the inadequacy of the nation’s recall system.

“If I had heard about the problem even one week earlier and stopped then, I might have been able to avoid the disease completely, and life today would be very different,” Ebb said.

A POLITICO investigation found that the I.M. Healthy SoyNut Butter case — which officials at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have hailed as an improvement over past failures — was nonetheless emblematic of persistent weaknesses in the nation’s food-safety system, some of which haven’t been corrected for two years after being flagged by the agency’s inspector general.

Two months elapsed between the first person sickened by eating I.M. Healthy SoyNut Butter on Jan. 4 and the recall orders that began on March 3 and expanded three more times until March 10. The FDA, working through a national network of labs that identifies outbreaks, pinpointed the contamination on Feb. 22. The nine-day lag time in persuading the manufacturer to begin recalling the tainted products was a significant improvement over previous lag times — which were as high as 165 days in one infamous case, according to the inspector general. But victims maintain that the FDA should have ordered a recall on its own authority, given that a few days or even hours can make a difference in a deadly outbreak.

“They have the authority to mandate a recall and, in theory, that would go more quickly than a voluntary recall,” said Sandra Eskin, who directs food safety at the Pew Charitable Trust. The FDA has used its authority to order recalls only three times since 2011. Instead, it usually waits to give companies time to decide whether to pull a product from shelves voluntarily.

There were complications, as well, in alerting customers to the fact of the recall. The FDA did not identify which retailers sold the contaminated batches of products. (The agency has traditionally considered this information to be trade secrets, and left it to manufacturers to alert retailers.) Thus, customers who saw only the FDA’s recall notice had no way of knowing whether the products they bought were among those that were contaminated.

“They just did not effectively execute the recall,” said Eskin. “You really have to monitor where the product is sold and reach out to the sellers online.”

Indeed, the contaminated products remained available for months afterward. Linda Harris, a food-safety microbiologist for the University of California at Davis who researched the case for the victims, said she was able to buy a three-pack of I.M. Healthy Original Creamy SoyNut Butter on Amazon in September, five months after the recall. In addition, some stores either missed or ignored the recall and kept the product on the shelves, Harris discovered.

Part of the problem, critics contend, was a lack of urgency: The cautious language of the FDA’s warning didn’t mention potential illnesses until the third paragraph, and the only instruction offered was to return the product to the place it was bought to receive “a full refund.”

“Amazon didn’t provide the information about the seriousness of the recall and the reason,” contended Sarah Sorscher, deputy director of regulatory affairs for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “You should not have to click through to a government website while you’re eating breakfast to find out that you have a deadly product in your kitchen.”

The weaknesses in the soy nut butter case were all the more notable because they came 8½ months after the FDA’s inspector general declared that it lacked adequate procedures for handling food outbreaks.

“We found that the FDA did not have an efficient and effective food recall initiation process that helps ensure the safety of the Nation’s food supply,” Inspector General Daniel Levinson wrote on June 8, 2016. “This issue is a significant matter and requires the FDA’s immediate attention.”

Now, more than two years after the IG’s warning, the agency is still updating its procedures. In congressional hearings and blog posts earlier this year, FDA officials have pledged to take specific steps to improve the recall system, including a proposed rule to alert the public to dangers before recalls are announced. Among the other changes promised include revealing which retailers sold the tainted products “in certain cases,” developing a database to help the agency identify contaminated products and requiring companies to issue public warnings more quickly. . . .

Continue reading. There’s much more.

Breakfast at Jam: Pork Belly Benedict

We had breakfast at Jam Café this morning. That’s the Pork Belly Benedict. The pork belly was cooked with one side very crisp (as you can see), which works well for bacon (which is thin), but not so well for pork belly, which seemed tough instead of crisp. Still, very tasty.

I think next time I’ll try the Huevos Rancheros. The coffee was especially good.

Fourth of July shave: Edwin Jagger synthetic, Chiseled Face Summer Storm, and the RazoRock Mamba

No storm in sight today, but a fine fragrance anyway. Great lather, and the Mamba is a treat to use. A splash of Summer Storm to finish, and I’m ready for the day.

Not a holiday here, but we’re treating it as one, beginning with breakfast at Jam (and note the lunch options as well).

Update: See next post.