Food Safety NewsHelena Bottemiller is a Washington, DC-based reporter covering food policy and politics for Food Safety News. Helena first delved into the world of food safety while writing her thesis on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at Claremont McKenna College in Los Angeles. At Food Safety News, she has covered Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and several high-profile food safety stories, including the half-billion Salmonella egg recall and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Helena has appeared on BBC World and been featured in USA Today and her work is widely cited by mainstream and niche media. She tweets about food and agriculture policy at @hbottemiller.
The Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday approved a $22 million bump in discretionary funding for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for fiscal year 2013, giving the agency $2.54 billion.Of the increase, $12.5 million is designated specifically for implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act, according to a summary released by the committee. "This funding level takes into consideration the federal...
As the budget process in Washington rolls along, the House and Senate remain at odds over doling out resources that impact the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The House on Wednesday released the allocation for discretionary spending for FDA and agriculture programs for fiscal year 2013, which is $19.4 billion below the spending ceiling set by last summer's Budget Control...
The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC, released a working paper this month recommending a single food safety agency, better market incentives, and more foodborne illness data and surveillance. In the paper, AEI scholar Sébastien Pouliot acknowledges the difficulty in making major changes to America's food regulatory system, citing the long and tenuous debate over the...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration released a new report this week outlining the ways the agency is trying to fulfill its mission globally. Though the report, titled "Global Engagement Report," covers the broad swath of FDA-regulated products, including medical devices, drugs and cosmetics, it also details some of the agency's key food safety initiatives abroad. "As our world transforms...
It's been well over a year since the monumental Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was signed into law and so far implementation has been riddled with speed bumps, not to mention funding woes. Four of the most critical rules that Congress mandated the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to write and put in place -- preventative controls for food facilities,...
Thirty lawmakers wrote to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Thursday asking what the U.S. Department of Agriculture has done and can do in the future to help stop "the campaign of the misinformation" about Lean Finely Textured Beef, now widely known to American consumers as "pink slime."Calling the media coverage and subsequent consumer revolt against LFTB "a campaign of misinformation,"...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will delay a proposed rule to expand a controversial poultry inspection system, ABC World News reported in a scathing segment Wednesday. The decision was made "to give the agency more time to respond to critics," according to the report by ABC's Jim Avila, who was a key figure in the recent "pink slime" firestorm. The...
On the heels of Dole's announcement that the company is recalling nearly 800 bags of lettuce after Salmonella was detected by state health officials conducting random sampling in New York state, U.S. PIRG (the federation of State Public Interest Research Groups) is chastising a plan to cut the nation's largest produce testing program."The Agriculture Department's tiny $5 million Microbiological Data...
The National Chicken Council has denied Food & Water Watch lobbyist Tony Corbo's request to work in a HACCP Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP) poultry plant to better understand how the new program works. Corbo recently wrote to NCC asking that the group make arrangements for him to work for a full week as a sorter in a poultry plant...
The animal agriculture industry is facing another round of unflattering headlines. The Humane Society of the United States on Thursday released video and photographs of alleged abuse and insanitary conditions at a large egg farm that supplies the mid-Atlantic region. HSUS, an animal rights group loathed by the livestock sector, last year struck a historic deal with the egg industry...
After sharply criticizing a proposal to expand the HACCP Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP) pilot to more poultry plants, Food & Water Watch is asking for unfettered access to a HIMP plant to better evaluate the idea.In a letter to the National Chicken Council and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service, Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is taking its biggest step yet to rein in the indiscriminate use of antibiotics that help food animals grow bigger, faster. The agency said Wednesday it is asking veterinary drug makers to voluntarily phase out medically important drugs from being available over the counter in the hope that the shift will help combat growing...
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) is keeping the pressure on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to label mechanically tenderized beef. Some 50 million pounds of these needle- or blade-tenderized steaks are sold in the United States each month, but they are not labeled even though food safety officials recommend non-intact steaks be cooked to a higher internal temperature to kill bacteria....
If you listen to both critics and proponents of a new U.S. Department of Agriculture proposal to expand a pilot poultry inspection program, you might wonder if they're talking about the same thing. In January, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service proposed expanding the HACCP Based Inspection Models Project, known as HIMP, beyond the handful of plants that have...
New research raises questions about whether poultry producers might still be using an antibiotic that was banned in 2005 after being linked to increasing antibiotic resistance.Researchers at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) and Arizona State University tested feather meal -- a byproduct made of ground-up poultry feathers commonly added to chicken, swine, cattle and fish feed --...
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