Source: Michael Fielding, MEATINGPLACE, 12/22/14


Citing a need for improvement in addressing cross-agency food safety efforts, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is directing Congress to lead efforts in developing a government-wide food safety performance plan, according to a new report on federal food safety oversight.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and USDA “vary in the amount of detail they provide on their crosscutting food safety efforts. In addition, they do not include several relevant crosscutting efforts, such as the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System,” according to the GAO.

Although the Food and Drug Administration and USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) have mechanisms in place to facilitate interagency coordination on food safety that focus on specific issues, none provides for broad-based, centralized collaboration, according to the GAO.

For example, FDA and FSIS are collaborating with the CDC through the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration to improve estimates of foodborne illness sources. “However, this and other mechanisms do not allow FDA, FSIS, and other agencies to look across their individual programs and determine how they all contribute to federal food safety goals,” according to the findings of the GAO, which reported that nearly all the experts interviewed for the report agreed that a centralized collaborative mechanism on food safety is “important to foster effective interagency collaboration and could enhance food safety oversight.”

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