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Bill would create single food safety agency

A single food safety agency is the aim of a bill introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate, sponsored by two Democrats.

Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut says the Safe Food Act of 2015 would fix the “fragmented, outdated patchwork system of food safety” which “puts lives at risk.”

She says the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has said since 2007 that the system of 15 different federal agencies is broken and sometimes confusing, “About food safety, about product recalls – and for more than a decade the GAO has been warning that this is a situation that poses a risk to our healthy.”

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin says the Republican controlled Congress will ask why this legislation is needed, “My argument to them is, why do you want to waste money? Why do you want to expose Americans and their families to unsafe food and all of the health consequences? Why don’t we make this a more efficient operation, a leaner operation but one that, by coordinating efforts, doesn’t have so much duplication and waste?”

DeLauro says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says more than 100-thousand Americans are hospitalized with foodborne illnesses every year and 3-thousand of them die.