America's antiquated food security system is caught in a pressure cooker and faces a crisis due to major gaps in quality control and inconsistencies among the nation's disparate monitoring agencies.
"We can't adequately protect people from contaminated foods if we continue to use 100 year-old practices," said Jeff Levi, executive director of the non-profit organization Trust for America's Health (TFAH).
"We need to bring food safety into the 21st century. We have the technology. We're way past due for a smart and strategic upgrade."
Some 76 million Americans, or one in four people, fall victim every year to food poisoning, of which some 325,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die, according to the estimates in a TFAH report released on Wednesday.
Entitled "Fixing Food Safety: Protecting America's Food Supply from Farm-to-Fork," the report said the health costs and the losses to the US economy from such illnesses was an estimated 44 billion dollars a year.
It maintained that the inefficiencies in the system were due in part to poor use of funding and the fact that responsibility for ensuring the safety of the nation's food supply lay in the hands of some 15 different local and federal agencies.
Most of the federal funds available were "spent on outdated practices of inspecting every poultry, beef and pork carcass, even though changing threats and modern agriculture practices and technology make this an unproductive use of government resources," the report said.
And in contrast, not enough money was pumped into "fighting modern bacteria threats, such as trying to reduce Salmonella or dangerous strains of E. coli," it added.
Some 85 percent of illness from contaminated foods was linked to foodstuffs that were controlled by the federal Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), even though it received less than half of the federal funds devoted to quality control.
And the FDA has also seen a drain in staff over the past three years, with the departures of at least 20 percent of their scientists and some 600 inspectors, the report said.
"Gaps in current inspection practices mean acts of agroterrorism -- such as contamination of wheat gluten or botulism -- could go undetected until they are widespread," it said.
On top of that, only about one percent of imported foodstuffs are inspected, although 60 percent of the nation's fresh fruits and vegetables and 75 percent of seafood are imported.
In its report, the TFAH calls for a series of actions to modernize the food safety system including drawing up uniform performance standards, boosting the FDA with more funding and working to improve monitoring.
