News Briefs
Warnings to schools slow on tainted food
Oct 15, 2009 12:44 PM
Federal agencies supplying food for 31 million schoolchildren fail to ensure that tainted products are pulled quickly from cafeterias, a congressional audit showed.
The Government Accountability Office said delays put children and staff at risk of food poisoning.
In the most recent recall, when salmonella-infected peanut butter sickened almost 700 people, the audit found that the government failed to disseminate “timely and complete notification about suspect food products provided to schools through the federal commodities program.”
Alerts sometimes take a week to reach schools, due in part to miscommunication between the Agricultural Department and the Food and Drug Administration. The Food and Nutrition Service, an agency within the Department of Agriculture, lacks systems to ensure that it is notified when the Food and Drug Administration begins a food-safety investigation that may lead to a recall, the audit said. The agency only begins to advise schools not to serve the food when an FDA recall is well underway.
Auditors cited the recalls of 4,000 products containing peanuts from the Peanut Corp. of America. After salmonella was traced to the Georgia plant, the FDA announced a limited recall of products made there during a specific period. But the Food and Nutrition Service determined that its purchases from the plant were not made during that time and said on its Web site that schools weren’t affected.
Not until six days later, after the recall was expanded to cover products made on other dates, did the service tell schools to pull all the plant’s products.
The result: hundreds of students sickened and 46 hospitalized.
USA Today, Sept. 22
