Good news, consumers. According to trade press accounts, the Centers for Disease Control is on the verge of reducing sharply the number of deaths it attributes to food-borne illness. Rather than the oft-cited estimate of 9,000 deaths a year resulting from tainted food, the agency now puts the figure at somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000, Food Chemical News reports.
Interestingly, the story goes on to report health officials are preparing for a backlash once the new numbers appear. Backlash? Against good news? Well, good news about food safety is bad news for persons who believe that only expanded federal bureaucracy can do the job: Why spend more money to fix what may not really be broken?
Undeterred by these happy tidings, President Clinton has taken a break from his vacation to sign an executive order creating a government panel to oversee food safety. The President's Council on Food Safety would comprise the secretaries of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Commerce, along with the heads of the Office of Management and Budget, Environmental Protection Agency and the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Make that Re-enlarging Government.
Now on the face of it, the naming of another bureaucratic acronym with the laudable task of overseeing food safety is commendable. Presidential spokesman Rahm Emmanuel said the group would help modernize a food-safety system that Teddy Roosevelt put in place. And the National Academy of Sciences did just release a report calling, among other things, for the naming of a food czar with sweeping powers to reorganize and streamline existing regulatory supervision of the food supply. Right now, there are 12 agencies using 35 statutes doing the job. Rearranging the regulatory furniture seems in order.
But right at the top of the report's executive summary, the NAS cites the estimate of 9,000 deaths related to food-borne illness, which may give people a misleading idea of what's really at stake here. The CDC began using that figure about 10 years ago, say officials at the Georgetown Center for Food and Nutrition, but other federal food-safety experts played it down as an estimate or extrapolation. These qualifiers magically disappeared when regulators got hold of it, and the 9,000 deaths became official.
Says the center, the figure "is given a lot of credit for fueling the President's Food Safety Initiative and assorted other programs. It also became a clarion cry for many well-meaning people who conscientiously demanded food safety reform without knowing the history of the figure. And the figure became irresistible to those who have orchestrated the politicization of food safety." CDC officials could not be reached for comment.
Lost in all this is the apparent success of other, earlier initiatives in promoting food safety: the implementation of new meat, poultry and seafood monitoring systems, for example, the approval of irradiation technology for food products or the provision of information related to safe food handling practices. If anything, food safety seems better than ever.
Sure it's a good thing to cut back the bureaucratic and statutory dead wood, eliminate overlapping jurisdictions and coordinate responsibilities of government at all levels. And maybe the creation of one more government council will really do that.
But perhaps the most important recommendation in the NAS report is its emphasis on using strong, science-based risk analysis to deal first with the biggest risks facing consumers today. The good news, as mentioned above, is that when scientists determine what those risks are, food safety is likely to be a tiny one.
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