Be Healthy!

TERRA BELLA, Calif. - The reason it didn't take dozens of illnesses for federal regulators to learn about salmonella-tainted pistachios has nothing to do with federal regulations.
Routine but unrequired testing by a manufacturer for Kraft Foods Inc. first detected the contamination almost two weeks ago, when workers at a plant in Illinois decided to check roasted nuts going into huge vats of trail mix. Private auditors hired by Kraft later found problems they think caused the contamination at a supplier's processing facility in central California.
If Kraft had not chosen to prioritize testing, 2 million pounds of pistachios that touched off government warnings and a nationwide salmonella scare this week probably would still be on the market. Neither the Food and Drug Administration nor state laws require food manufacturers to test the safety of their products.
"We're relying on companies to find the contaminated foods on their own, and since there's no national standards for this, some companies don't bother to test at all," said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., a critic of the nation's food safety system. "What if these nuts had been distributed by a company that doesn't test? We wouldn't have found out until people got sick."
DeGette and numerous other lawmakers are calling for the FDA to develop testing regulations for every segment of the food industry, and want companies to be required to release test results.
Federal health officials warned people this week to avoid eating all pistachios and products containing them while they determine which products may be contaminated. The nuts Kraft manufacturer Georgia Nut Co. tested on March 20 came from Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella Inc., the second-largest pistachio processor in the nation, which has recalled more than 2 million pounds of its roasted pistachios.
The investigation of tainted pistachios contrasts sharply with that in this year's salmonella outbreak involving peanuts, the subject of a criminal investigation and thousands of recalls. The contamination was not traced to peanuts until hundreds of people around the country got sick. The company involved, Peanut Corp. of America, had tested its products, but inspection records show that in some cases it shipped peanuts it knew were probably tainted.
Private industry reported the pistachio problem immediately, rather than waiting for public health officials to intervene. And as of Wednesday, authorities had not confirmed any illnesses.
"You can call it a fluke, you can call it good luck, or you can call it good judgment on the part of Kraft," said Dr. David Acheson, FDA's assistant commissioner for food safety. "They're not required to tell us, they did and we're moving on it."
Acheson said the FDA does not mandate testing so companies are free to decide whether to take that step before distributing food products to stores.
Officials with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, an industry group that represents major food manufacturers, say Kraft has one of the most aggressive food safety systems in the business.
But they say getting the government to require testing of all foods is not the answer, since different foods are at risk of becoming contaminated at very different steps in the manufacturing process.
"You don't want to do testing just for the sake of doing testing," said the association's chief science officer, Robert Brackett. "That tends to be this one-size-fits all situation where it may work really well for some products and not for others. What we really focus on is for companies to build the safety into their programs in the first place."