NEWS RELEASE

Committee on Energy and Commerce
Rep. John D. Dingell, Chairman

Dingell, Stupak Move to Expose Purveyors of Adulterated Food

As part of an ongoing investigation into the safety of our nation’s food supply, leaders of the Committee on Energy and Commerce recently wrote to ten private laboratories that play a critical role in the nation’s food safety system. Reps. John D. Dingell (D-MI), Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak (D-MI), Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, have asked the laboratories to identify the importers of adulterated food in an effort to determine whether this food is making it into the country’s food supply.

Under the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Import Alert rules, private laboratories are responsible for analyzing the most dangerous imported food products entering this country. Products under Import Alert are only allowed to enter commerce after a private laboratory has determined they are safe. However, during its investigation, the Committee learned that it is routine occurrence for private laboratories to discard violative test results at the direction of the importer. When this occurs, the importer can then instruct the same private laboratory, or a different one, to test the product again until a clean result is obtained. This testing is done without alerting FDA that potentially dangerous food has been imported into this country and has entered commerce.

Noting that one lab has already supplied such information to the Committee, Dingell said, “Importers should not be permitted to ship food that they know to be contaminated to our stores and ultimately to our tables. The FDA has not taken enforcement action because the law does not require these dangerous scofflaws to report violative results. The legislation we are working on will require all private food labs to be certified and all test results to be provided to FDA at the same time it is given to importers.”

Stupak, noting that one FDA District (Dallas) apparently already requires all private labs analyzing food under import alert to inform FDA of the results, said: “The fact that the FDA tolerates this imminent threat to the public health is outrageous. We will probably never know how many people have suffered illness or worse because some importers have chosen to profit from selling tainted food. While our bill will ensure that this despicable practice stops, selling contaminated food is illegal and FDA ought to be in all these private labs now demanding the information necessary to protect the public health.”

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