President Obama wants to nearly double — to more than $1.2 billion — federal funding for combating and preventing antibiotic resistance. The administration is expected to release its full 2016 budget proposal next week, but a fact sheet released Tuesday provided a blueprint for investments in fighting antibiotic resistance —
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2014 in Review: Animal Antibiotics
Food Safety News wrote a lot about antibiotic resistance this year — particularly the debate surrounding the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) plan to phase out the use of certain antibiotics in food animals, introduced in December 2013, and conversations sparked by the 16-month outbreak of multi-drug-resistant Salmonella Heidelberg linked
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Slaughter Wins House Race Against Assini
After widening her lead in the final round of ballot counting Wednesday, Rep. Louise Slaughter now has the votes she needs to retain her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for New York’s 25th congressional district for a 15th term. After an additional 2,800 ballots were tallied Wednesday, Slaughter’s
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Assini-Slaughter Race Still Too Close to Call
The official winner of New York’s 25th congressional district is still unknown but incumbent Democrat Louise Slaughter leads Republican challenger Mark Assini by 651 votes and has declared victory. Slaughter, a microbiologist who gives great weight to food safety issues and is an avid defender of medically important antibiotics, has
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Mixed Results For Food Issues in Midterm Elections
The national headline of Tuesday’s elections is that Republicans have taken control of the U.S. Senate. This shift means that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will take over as Majority Leader for the 114th Congress and that Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), who won a hotly contested race, will become Senate Agriculture
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FDA: Antibiotics Sales to Farms Up 16 Percent Between 2009-12
Federal data released Thursday show that sales of medically important antimicrobials used in food-producing animals in the U.S. increased by 8 percent in 2012 and by 16 percent between 2009 and 2012. The Food and Drug Administration’s 2012 Summary Report of the information animal drug sponsors are required to report
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Reactions Vary to USDA’s Poultry Inspection Rule
The U.S. Department of Agriculture published the final rule of its Modernization of Poultry Slaughter Inspection on Thursday, requiring all poultry processing plants to engage in additional microbiological testing and establishing the New Poultry Inspection System (NPIS), which companies can choose to opt into or not. Predictably, the agency’s move
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FSIS Denies That It Buried News of Foster Farms Recall
The Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) insists that it did not time the release of last week’s Foster Farms recall so that it would garner less attention, as some suggest. “Burying news late at night on a holiday weekend may be a time-honored tradition by Washington
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Congresswomen Propose Solution to Issue of Pathogens as Adulterants
Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Louise Slaughter (D-NY) are introducing a bill in the House of Representatives that would give the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) the authority to declare any foodborne pathogen an adulterant and recall contaminated products. 
Rep. Rosa DeLauro
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Lawsuit Seeks USDA Response to Salmonella as Adulterant Petition
On the third anniversary of filing a petition to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to have antibiotic-resistant Salmonella declared an adulterant, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is still waiting for a response. On Wednesday, the consumer advocate group filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court
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