Thompson: Food safer, but more work necessary
Thompson: Food safer, but more work necessary
Response to Katrina was a 'screw up'
The United States food supply still is vulnerable to terrorism, but heightened inspections and other counterterrorism measures make it considerably safer than it was a few years ago, former U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson said.
Thompson caused quite a stir when he issued a blunt warning about the food supply as he stepped down from his post in December 2004. "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," he said at a farewell press conference. "And we are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."
Thompson was asked to revisit those comments at a June 11 press conference in Tampa, FL, after delivering the key note address at the annual conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.
"We have come a long way in improving it but I am still not satisfied," he told Bioterrorism Watch. "I am very concerned about the possibility of tampering with our food."
In terms of overall all-hazards preparedness, Hurricane Katrina was a shocking wake-up call, he said. "What surprised me was that America is so unprepared and how much more we have to do," Thompson said. "And I am not being critical of the administration, homeland security, FEMA or anybody else. But the truth of the matter is, we screwed up after Katrina. Allowing a situation where dead bodies are chained to a stop sign so they don't float away. To me, that is absolutely ridiculous in this great county called America. We should not be allowing that to happen."
While speaking with the bluntness of one who has been freed of the political constraints of a cabinet position, Thompson went beyond criticism to offer solutions.
"We have got to put fast response teams together that are educated and trained," he said. "We have to be able to have surge capacity. We did not have surge capacity for Katrina. We do not have surge capacity for H5N1 [avian influenza] if it starts becoming transmissible from human to human. We don't have enough hospital beds to do that. What are we going to do with those individuals? We don't have enough respirators. We have 105,000 respirators in this country today and 90,000 are being used. Are we going to take a respirator away from somebody that is dependent upon it to live and give it to someone else? Absolutely not."
FDA responding to food concerns
During his four years as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Thompson pushed through several measures to increase food inspections and implement other tampering safeguards.
"We are investing a lot more money [into food safety] from what I inherited," he said. "We almost doubled the budget — 100% in four years — for inspections. We need to get more employees at FDA to inspect our food. When I got there, we were inspecting about one-half of 1% of the food that is coming into America. We are up to almost 5% now, but that is still a small amount."
In addition to more manpower, more technology needs to be applied to the problem in terms of monitoring and testing devices.
"We have to bring in more technology to be able to monitor the foods and run tests of samples from all the ships and airplanes that are coming in," he says, "and we need to request better surveillance from countries that are exporting food into the United States. These are the kinds of things I was working on when I left and I would like to see more efforts put into these areas."
Thompson's concerns — and the publicity that ensued — have clearly resonated at the Food and Drug Administration. Andrew Von Eschenbach, MD, acting FDA commissioner, came before Congress earlier this year requesting a $20 million allocation for food defense in the fiscal year 2007 budget.
Part of the money would be used to expand the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN), a group of federal and state laboratories designed to aid in the rapid identification and response to an attack on the food system.
"The result of this investment will be a more robust and more geographically diverse capability to provide the essential surge capacity to test contaminated food samples and allow us to warn the public about threats to the food supply," Von Eschenbach testified.
The FDA is seeking funding to strengthen other aspects of food counterterrorism, including strengthening its Emergency Operations Network to allow more sophisticated incident tracking for food-related emergencies. The agency wants to target more "potentially high-risk" imported foods through Prior Notice Import Security Reviews based on intelligence, FDA inspection reports, discrepancies in prior notice reporting and sample collection and analysis, he reported.
The United States food supply still is vulnerable to terrorism, but heightened inspections and other counterterrorism measures make it considerably safer than it was a few years ago, former U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson said.Subscribe Now for Access
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