Fda's Responsibility

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Who Is Responsible? According to Nature Medicine, although we have numerous amounts of federal food laws, approximately 130,000 people are hospitalized, and about 3,000 people die yearly due to eating contaminated foods (Nature 1). Although individuals need to be cautious with what they consume, Americans should be able to trust that the FDA and the USDA are inspecting and processing the food like they are supposed to. On January 4, 2011, President Barack Obama signed a new FDA law that shifted the focus of reacting to food safety problems to instead, preventing the illnesses (FDA 260). This in turn proves that the higher government believes that it is the FDA’s responsibility to keep our food safe. Based on the law mentioned above and …show more content…
Instances include 2,000 pet food products recalled, 600 people became ill due to contaminated peanut butter, 1,400 were people sickened from imported peppers, 9 deaths occurred and hundreds more illnesses traced back to the peanut paste in the Peanut Corporation of America, and 2,000 illnesses linked to contaminated eggs in which 500 million eggs were recalled (FDA 261). These are just a few instances, and yet the statistics of these illnesses are mind blowing. Apart from all the instances mentioned, there was one instance mentioned in the film Food, Inc. in which a lady by the name of Barbara Kowalcyk gives an account of her son Kevin, age 2, who died in less than a month from E.coli O157:H7. In the film, Barbara states how when Kevin was first diagnosed with the disease, the public health department where she lived, never got back to her on the stool samples her family gave to see if they had the disease. Eventually, Kevin dies from the disease and that’s when Barbara and her mother decided to dig further into what happened. What they found was disturbing in many levels and it kept getting worse. The first thing that they found is where Kevin had gotten his disease from. When learning about the company that he contracted the E.coli from, they also learned that the same company had failed multiple E.coli tests. The company …show more content…
FDA can help us be more cautious by making sure labels are sufficient, and understandable to all people. Consumers can do their part by simply reading the labels, and by making sure that the contents do not make them sick. Many people have allergies that they are clearly aware of, yet they refuse to read the labels to make sure the food is safe for them to eat. There have been a few instances of sicknesses because containers were not labeled properly. If things like this continue to happen, people will continue to get sick and more people will die (not to mention all the mad people who get violent when something doesn’t go their way). If we can’t keep our own country together because of something as simple as food, then we will be conquered easily and quickly. What we really need are wiser and more effective people in office to put new laws into place that will have an effect on what really happens in factories. We don’t need more sicknesses. That’s clearly only making things