Food Safety Summit: Regulatory Leaders Discuss Priorities in Food Safety and Public Health

During the Food Safety Summit in Rosemont, Ill., today, the annual Town Hall panel, comprising regulatory leaders from the FDA, USDA-FSIS, CDC and AFDO, once again drew a crowd and numerous questions from the audience.

The panel of speakers changed last minute, of course, as Kyle Diamantas, deputy commissioner and head of the Human Foods Program, was originally slated to represent FDA. However, with the change in Diamantas’ role earlier this week upon the resignation of Marty Makary from the FDA commissioner’s post, Donald A. Prater, principal deputy director for Human Foods, FDA, stepped in.

Prater shared details on what the division was working on to drive a prevention-based approach to foodborne illness. “Regulations and guidance are not magic bullets,” he said. The work that industry does every day was making the difference in keeping the food supply safe.

Root cause analysis, he said, promises that industry can learn from one outbreak to prevent the next if used broadly and deeply — more so than industry is doing right now. “Once the immediate crisis is resolved, the deeper work begins,” he explained. Finding the “why” and “how” helps organizations avoid simply treating the symptoms of the issue.

Root cause analysis is also more effective when it’s a group effort to build a complete picture and then collaborate on the results to help others prevent similar issues from cropping up. During the Q&A session, Prater said it was not a new concept, but it was now “so central to everything we do.”

Additionally, recall modernization continues to be a priority for the FDA. He talked about the infant formula recall briefly during the session, and said FDA did more than 4,000 recall effectiveness checks during that event and still found product on shelves when it should have been removed. Improving the ability to communicate with consumers on recalls also was on the workbench for the administration.

Another powerful tool for translating food safety science into real-world action is developing meaningful, science-based guidance. Again, collaboration between multiple parties is critical. FDA has done this for various fresh-cut produce, controlled-environment agriculture and ready-to-eat foods, Prater said. Root cause analysis becomes a mechanism here to further verify and test any best practices that are shared as guidance.

Mindy Brashears, under secretary for food safety as USDA, also spoke about the challenges that the industry faces, thanking those in attendance for their hard work to keep people safe. In her second stint in the role, she said her goal was to lay a strong foundation to build upon for whomever follows her as under secretary.

She then detailed the policies that are currently in place for the organization to build upon now. Salmonella is the first priority Brashears mentioned, and getting the tools aligned properly to go after this pathogen was in the works now. FSIS is looking at highly pathogenic Salmonella present in samples now, taking cues from the work FSIS did with E. coli to identify the most pathogenic strains.

Secondly, FSIS has a strong Listeria rule, but the organization is still going after it, looking to do more sampling, testing and further reduce the number of Listeria illnesses. A large number of processors are at high risk for Listeria contamination of products, she said, which has FSIS’ attention.

Brashears also noted the group was looking at labeling for product made in the U.S. and working more to help smaller processors. And finally, she mentioned the reorganization of the group to its new locations in Iowa and Georgia, saying that they’d be really “amplifying science and training” as a result of these changes.

One interesting question revolved around funding and testing for highly pathogenic avian influenza in dairy cattle from a dairy processor in attendance. Prater addressed that directly, saying that the milk supply is safe, full stop, and that the agencies represented on stage plus APHIS were working together on HPAI more than ever. Brashears added that she had not heard of less testing particularly in the poultry flocks but thanked the processor for bringing it up and promised to look into what was happening with the dairy herd testing issue.

Gwen Biggerstaff, deputy director at the CDC, and Steve Mandernach, executive director of AFDO, also spoke and answered questions that involved retail and foodservice inspections and the public health angle where applicable.