FDA to Require Faster Reporting of Food-Safety Problems

http://www.ajc.com/health/content/shared-auto/healthnews/cdc-/630785.html

New regulations announced by the FDA require all food companies to report potential food-borne illness problems within 24 hours. Any company that manufactures, processes, or distributes food must file an electronic report when there is a probability that a food product will cause a serious sickness or death. The system used to file electronic reports, the Reportable Food Registry (RFR), was created through an act of Congress two years ago in order to prevent the spread of dangerous foodstuffs through the supply chain.

Presumably, the RFR and the relatively brief 24 hour deadline for reporting will help prevent the types of deadly bacterial outbreaks that have caused major scares in the marketplace. However, this type of compulsory reporting regulation raises several issues. First, how does one verify that a company knows (or does not know) if they have a problem? Clearly, it would be advantageous for a company not to know that they had an issue, since they can't report something they don't recognize. The 24 hour time period could also cause a company that had an issue that it couldn't report within the time period to withhold reporting on it indefinitely.

A puzzling side note is the exemption of dietary supplements and infant formulas, which are bound to their own reporting procedures. If the goal of the RFR is to have a standardized and centralized systems, why are these two bizarrely grouped categories not included?

The food industry is large and complex - tracking food from supplier to consumer is far from trivial. While the use of information systems to track trends like food-borne illness seems promising, the challenges of organizing the broad and diverse food supply chain will require cooperation on all sides and my introduce opportunities for gaming the system.