Editorial: Obama should put food safety under one roof

President Barack Obama has a lot on his plate these days. But he should move quickly to create a single agency with the sole purpose of ensuring the safety of the nation's food supply.

The inefficiency of the current system boggles the mind. The Department of Agriculture receives 80 percent of the money allocated by Congress to ensure food safety, but it only regulates 20 percent of the supply — meat, poultry and eggs. The Food and Drug Administration gets the other 20 percent of the money to watch over everything else.

The FDA is inspecting less than 1 percent of food imports. It continues to botch its handling of salmonella outbreaks like the peanut butter fiasco that first surfaced in November, and it hasn't checked on the accuracy of nutrition labels in 10 years.

If that doesn't meet Obama's criteria for eliminating or altering ineffective programs, what does?

The president has said he hopes to appoint a new FDA commissioner in the next week. The first assignment should be to put food safety under one roof and separate it from drug safety, a very different challenge. The National Academy of Sciences first made that recommendation 10 years ago.

The next priority is a tracking system for all food products and for food-borne illness. The salmonella outbreak from tainted peanut butter has sickened 575 people in 43 states. Every year more than 50 million Americans become ill from food. Enough is enough. If the food

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industry doesn't volunteer to help pay for enough independent inspectors and surveillance systems, then the government will have to levy fees.

Former President George W. Bush saw the FDA as such a low priority that he didn't have a permanent commissioner in place for more than half of his years in office. It shows. Obama has a lot of catching up to do.

FDA Should Reconsider Aspartame Cancer Risk, Say Experts

A new long-term animal test from an Italian cancer institute raises serious safety questions about the artificial sweetener aspartame, which is marketed generically as well as under the NutraSweet and Equal brand names.

A dozen toxicology and epidemiology experts and the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest are calling on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to immediately review the study, which found increases in lymphomas, leukemias, and breast cancers in rats.

If FDA concludes that aspartame does cause cancer in animals, the agency is required by law to revoke its approval for the controversial sweetener, which is used in Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke, tabletop packets, and countless other foods. Read the entire release here.

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