Federal Judge Phyllis Hamilton has sided with the Center for Food Safety again; on August 13 she told the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that there can be no more extensions of rules in the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The rules should have been completed last July, but there have been delays at the Office of Management and Budget, and the FDA has extended comment periods several times.
General public concern about food safety has shown a marked increase over the past two years, according to a recent survey by Chicago-based consultancy Technomic. In a poll conducted in mid-July, Technomic found that 40 percent of consumers were “extremely concerned” about food safety issues in restaurants.
FSIS on August 15 published Directive 9000.8, Audits of the U.S. Meat, Poultry, and Egg Products Inspection System by Officials of Foreign Countries. The document provides instructions to FSIS personnel for planning, organizing, and working with officials of foreign countries when they audit the U.S. inspection system for meat, poultry, or egg products establishments.
Now available from Reportlinker.com is the new market research report, "Global Food Safety Testing Market Analysis," published by the Indian firm RNCOS. The report concludes that regulatory amendments and technological developments bode well for prodigious growth in the market.
The attorney general of New York State has subpoenaed a former Herbalife employee to produce internal documents about a 2011 food safety problem — fine shards of metal were detected in the company's Formula 1 nutrition shake as it left the production line at a California processing plant.
Since April 2013, the Chicago Department of Public Health has been using an automated application, called Foodborne Chicago, to search Twitter for posts that include the words "food poisoning" by people who identify themselves as Chicagoans. The health department then contacts some of those people to obtain more information, which in some cases triggers restaurant inspections; in turn, some of those inspections have uncovered violations.
On August 12, 2013 Taylor Farms de Mexico officially informed the FDA that, as of August 9, 2013, the company voluntarily suspended production and shipment of any salad mix, leafy green, or salad mix components from its operations in Mexico to the United States. The firm has committed to not resume production and shipping of these products from its operations in Mexico without FDA’s approval. To date only the salad mix has been implicated in the outbreak of cyclosporiasis in Iowa and Nebraska.
The international standards group Codex Alimentarius has established two new Electronic Working Groups — one to address Deoxyynivalenol (DON) Maximum Limits and another to develop a Code of Practice to prevent and reduce contamination in food and feed by Pyrrolizidine Alkaloid — both of which have issued Calls for Data.
A total of 307 persons infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella Typhimurium have been reported from 37 states, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on August 9.
NSF International's Applied Research Center (ARC) has released the 2013 NSF International Household Germ Study, revealing that many common kitchen items harbor unsafe levels of E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, yeast and mold.
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