A new kind of professional There are missing professions that would integrate epidemiology, farming and ecology. These are professions that would deal not just with existing human pathogens on-farm and in the rural environment, but with emerging pathogens and their control or prevention. They would cover the interaction of human pathogens with current microbial ecology,…
FDA's Proposed Produce Rule: A War on Farmers
The deadline for comments on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Produce Safety Rule is Nov. 15, 2013. This was probably supposed to be the easiest and most straightforward of the rules to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). It may be that FDA fell into the trap of a well-worn groove in designing …
FDA's Proposed Produce Rules Consistently Ignore Microbial Ecology
An unnoticed side effect of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) proposed Produce Rules will be the impact on the economics of large-scale animal production in the United States because they will be unable to dispose of their manures and litter off-site. Cattlemen, large chicken producers and other industry groups may have thought that…
FDA Barely Considers Biological, Chemical and Radiological Inputs in Proposed Produce Rule
Violating the explicit language of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FMSA), the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Proposed Produce Rule gives a complete pass to imported vegetables grown with sewage sludge, contaminated to various degrees with heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, volatiles, flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, steroids, hormones (1,2) radiologicals (3) and undescribed contaminants. At the …