Melamine: The global food supply threat continues

Salmonella in peanut butter. Melamine in baby formula. BPA in plastic bottles. The mounting threat to the international food supply is a crisis that public health officials cannot afford to sweep under the rug. Yesterday, we mentioned President Obama's concern over the salmonella outbreak and his promise to review FDA operations.

A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article (in the February 4th issue) delves into the ongoing health concern surrounding melamine contamination since 2007, and points to how the scandal has highlighted weaknesses in the FDA's ability to protect the public health as the food supply becomes increasingly global. Baby formula tainted with melamine has sickened approximately 300,000 infants in China, and six have died. And in 2007, thousands of pets became sick, or died, from eating pet food imported from China that had been laced with melamine.

Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union, criticized the FDA for not recalling the contaminated baby formula and for not quickly establishing limits for melamine, in combination with related compounds such as cyanuric acid—which appears to be much more toxic. Halloran has urged the FDA to conduct much wider testing of infant formula to determine the magnitude of melamine contamination.

We've been talking about melamine here and on our Safety blog since 2007, and last year, Consumers Union outlined several priorities for overhauling the FDA:

• FDA should be required to inspect all food production facilities on a routine basis, both domestic and foreign, and increase inspections at the border; and
• FDA needs to have comprehensive mandatory recall authority governing both domestic and foreign food producers, to enable the agency to remove contaminated foods from shelves.

Find out more about what Consumers Union is doing to get the FDA to expand testing of infant formula. And tell us, how confident are you in the FDA’s ability to protect the food supply?