New Bush panel to police food imports
Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:50:19 GMT
By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Wednesday established a high-level government panel to recommend steps to guarantee the safety of food and other products shipped into the United States and to improve U.S. policing of those imports. The White House denied the effort was aimed primarily at China.
The president was to meet later Wednesday with his new Import Safety Working Group. The panel will be chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt.
"The administration is concerned about the safety of imported products that Americans eat and use and we'll start working on concrete steps to address whatever problems they may uncover," said White House spokesman Tony Snow.
The Food and Drug Administration's ability to monitor the nation's food supply has come under sharp criticism from Congress and others amid a string of high-profile cases of foodborne illness, including E. coli-tainted spinach and salmonella-contaminated peanut butter and snack foods, as well as concerns about drug-laced, farmed fish imported from China.
"This is not a slap at China," said Snow when asked if he thought China would be offended by Bush's action. "This is in fact a normal piece of business. We get food imports from 150 countries around the world. It's important to monitor them all."
Members of Congress have criticized the FDA's plan to close half of its laboratories.
Bush created the new panel with an executive order.
Nancy Nord, acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, called the formation of the panel "a wonderful step. The administration is moving aggressively to address the issue."
Earlier, she told a Senate hearing that the rapid growth of imports is putting a strain on her agency. The intense pressures on regulatory agencies was also emphasized by officials from the FDA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at the hearing by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
Bush took the action as China announced that teams of food safety officials from the U.S. and China would meet in Beijing at the end of this month to discuss the safety of China's seafood exports. The FDA announced last month that it would detain Chinese catfish and several other categories of fish as well as shrimp and eel after repeated testing turned up contamination with drugs that have not been approved in the United States for use in farmed seafood.
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On the Net:
Food and Drug Administration: http://www.fda.gov
Fruits veggies dont stop cancer return
Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:55:31 GMT
By CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
CHICAGO - Hopes that a diet low in fat and chock-full of fruits and vegetables could prevent the return of breast cancer were dashed Tuesday by a large, seven-year experiment in more than 3,000 women.
The government study found no benefit from a mega-veggies-and-fruit diet over the U.S. recommended servings of five fruits and vegetables a day — more than most Americans get.
Researchers noted that none of the breast cancer survivors lost weight on either diet. That led some experts to suggest that weight loss and exercise should be the next frontier for cancer prevention research. The study appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
"It sends us back to the drawing board," said Susan Gapstur of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, who wasn't involved in the new study but co-wrote an accompanying editorial in the journal.
"Should we really have focused on dietary components like fruits, vegetables and fat?" Gapstur asked. "Or should we be focusing, in addition to diet, on lifestyle factors including physical activity and weight?"
For now, the message for the 2.4 million breast cancer survivors in the United States is that they don't need to go overboard on veggies, researchers said.
"This should really lift some of the guilt if women are feeling, 'I'm just not doing enough,'" said study co-author Marcia Stefanick of Stanford University.
The research was kicked off by a $5 million grant from the late Wal-Mart heir John Walton and got an additional $30 million in support from the National Cancer Institute.
Walton wanted to support a scientific study so cancer survivors wouldn't have to "rely on folklore," said John Pierce, head of cancer prevention at University of California, San Diego, who led the research.
Earlier research on whether a healthy diet prevents breast cancer has shown mixed results. The new study was designed to be more rigorous.
In this experiment, all the women had been successfully treated for early stage breast cancer. Their average age was 53 when the study began.
A group of 1,537 women were randomly assigned to a daily diet that included five vegetable servings, three fruit servings, 16 ounces of vegetable juice and 30 grams of fiber. In most cases, a serving equaled a half-cup. French fries and iceberg lettuce couldn't be counted as vegetables.
The women were allowed to eat meat, but were told to get no more than 15 percent to 20 percent of their calories from fat, a goal they ultimately were unable to achieve.
"That's a tough diet," said Pierce, who ate that way himself along with his staff and the women in the study.
As a comparison, another 1,551 women were assigned to get educational materials about the importance of eating five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
The women in both groups kept food diaries regularly, but not daily, through the course of the study.
During the next seven years, the cancer returned in about the same proportion of women in both groups: 256 women of the women on the special diet and 262 women in the comparison group. About 10 percent of both groups died during that time, most of them from breast cancer.
It didn't matter whether the breast cancer was the most common type — fueled by hormones — or not; the special diet didn't prevent the cancer from coming back. Those results run counter to a previous study by different researchers that suggested low-fat diets may help prevent the return of the type of breast cancer that is not linked to hormones.
In the mega-veggies group, the women changed their eating habits substantially, mostly by increasing fruits and vegetables to as much as 11 servings a day. They failed to meet the fat target, but did eat 13 percent less in fat calories than did the comparison group.
After one year, women on the high-vegetable diet had 73 percent higher blood levels of carotenoids than the other women. That indicates they were truthful about how many fruits and vegetables they ate, Pierce said.
But they may not have been so honest about the calories they ate. The super-veggie group gained 1.3 pounds and the comparison group gained 0.88 pound, on average.
"There's no question they were underreporting on calories, especially the heavier women," Pierce said, or they would have lost weight.
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On the Net:
JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org
Lawmakers decry FDA plans to close labs
Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:59:20 GMT
By ANDREW BRIDGES, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Importers have learned to evade close federal scrutiny of the food they ship into the United States, putting consumers at increasing risk, congressional investigators said Tuesday.
Lawmakers also criticized the Food and Drug Administration's plan to close half of its laboratories. They called that idea misguided and questioned whether it would save money and enhance the agency's ability to target unsafe food, as FDA commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach said it would.
"FDA's ill-conceived decision to close seven of its 13 laboratories likely would expose American consumers to even more danger from unsafe foods, particularly imports," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., at a hearing of a House Committee on Energy and Commerce subcommittee.
Von Eschenbach said the lab plan was meant to modernize the FDA's food safety efforts.
The FDA's ability to police the nation's food supply has come under withering criticism from Congress and others amid a string of high-profile cases of foodborne illness, including E. coli-tainted spinach and salmonella-contaminated peanut butter and snack foods, as well as concerns about drug-laced, farmed fish imported from China.
An Energy and Commerce Committee investigation found the FDA now has little ability to police imports. In San Francisco, for example, the FDA's staff can conduct only a cursory review of imports, generally dedicating just 30 seconds to each shipment as it flashes by on a computer screen, according to investigators.
Even when products are flagged by the FDA, importers have learned to manipulate the system, investigators said. For example, the FDA relies on results obtained from private labs, but those labs produce results driven by financial rather than scientific concerns, investigators told the subcommittee.
Investigative counsel Kevin Barstow said he was told by an unnamed FDA deputy lab director that "none of the test results he's seen are completely accurate."
"The words he used were 'not good' and 'spooky,'" Barstow said.
Importers also can reduce the level of scrutiny by having their products test negative five consecutive times, according to the investigators. Since some large fish, including tuna, can be flagged for high mercury levels, importers will arrange to have five lots of smaller fish — generally younger and with comparatively less mercury — tested to obtain an all-clear from the FDA. Once the monitoring decreases, the importers can then resume bringing in larger fish that otherwise might not pass muster, the investigators said.
"You're saying the importers know how to maneuver around the FDA?" asked Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa.
"Yes," said committee senior investigator David Nelson.
Some potentially problematic seafood imports are being steered to enter the country in Las Vegas to avoid the scrutiny they might receive in San Francisco and other West Coast seaports, according to Nelson and other investigators.
The problems go beyond food. In Puerto Rico, investigators learned importers were getting around the FDA's blocking of imports of Chinese-made toothpaste made with an antifreeze ingredient by co-packaging them with toothbrushes. Examples of the tainted toothpaste included a Crest knockoff called "Crust," he added.
The decision to close and consolidate labs is likely to have a negative impact on safety, said B. Belinda Collins, the FDA's Denver district director. Furthermore, the reorganization would likely force many employees to retire or leave, said Carol Heppe, who faces the loss of her job as the FDA's Cincinnati district director.
"This will result in a mass loss of institutional knowledge and expertise at a time when the agency is trying to be proactive in our operations to prevent more emergencies," Heppe added.
Several of the most recent and high-profile food scares have involved imports from China, including deadly pet food ingredients spiked with industrial chemicals, farmed fish laced with antibiotics and snack food seasoning contaminated by salmonella.
"We know that we are vulnerable to harm from abroad where rules and regulations governing food production often are more lax than they are at home," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., in raising the prospect of terrorists tampering with imports entering the U.S. food supply.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said Congress shared some of the responsibility for the problems with food safety since it hasn't given the FDA enough money or power.
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On the Net:
Food and Drug Administration: http://www.fda.gov
