Hazard of Tainted Food Imports Cited by Panel : Charging FDA Fails to Shield Consumer, Dingell Calls Safeguards a ‘Russian Roulette System’

WASHINGTON —  It started in February in Starkville, Miss. Twenty-two people suffered severe nausea and vomiting after eating hamburgers and mushroom omelets in a student cafeteria at Mississippi State University. In Queens, N.Y., two weeks later, another 48 were stricken with similar symptoms after eating lunch at the salad bar of the employees’ cafeteria at Peninsula Hospital Center. Two months later, another 32 persons in two Pennsylvania towns got sick after eating restaurant pizza. No one died, but at least 15 people were hospitalized.

The culprit: canned mushrooms imported from China that were contaminated with bacteria.

Federal health officials believe this is the only known large-scale outbreak of food-borne disease that has been linked to imported canned food. But they have logged more than 1,100 isolated consumer complaints associated with canned imported food during the last five years, and warn that there are probably numerous others that go unreported every year.

Tainted Products

Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration--which is responsible for inspecting and regulating imported fruits, vegetables and canned foods--has failed to protect American consumers from tainted imported products, particularly low acid foods that are canned, congressional investigators have charged.

“It’s an absolute Russian roulette system,” Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) said Wednesday. “The chance that a contaminated shipment will be detected is small and the penalties are even smaller. Basically, the American consumer is on his or her own when it comes to imported foods.”

Dingell chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its subcommittee on oversight and investigations, which has been conducting a far-reaching inquiry into the regulatory activities of the FDA. The subcommittee is expected to make public its findings on how the federal agency inspects and monitors imported low-acid canned foods at a hearing Sept. 28.

FDA officials, who have been cooperating with the subcommittee investigation, said that they too are frustrated by their inability to crack down on imported foods. But, they said, they simply don’t have enough resources to do the job.

“The FDA uses its limited resources to target imports where we suspect there may be violations but obviously we can’t look at everything,” said Jeff Nesbit, an FDA spokesman.

Frequently, the FDA will act only after something happens and then the agency is often forced to divert resources from other areas of its operations to meet the emergency. For example, during the scare last March over cyanide-laced Chilean grapes--which resulted in a temporary ban on all fruit imported from Chile--the FDA invoked a sort of regulatory triage by shifting numerous personnel and funds from other areas of the agency to meet the crisis.

Imported foods, including noncanned items, make up 9% of the total U.S. food consumption, according to the subcommittee. Of that, the FDA physically inspects and tests only 2%, trying to focus on products where they suspect a potential risk, the subcommittee said. Of that 2%, about 40% are rejected because they are contaminated, the subcommittee said.

“It makes you wonder about the rest,” one subcommittee source said.

But the FDA’s Nesbit emphasized that the rejection rate is so high “because we look at shipments where we suspect we will find problems.”

In Los Angeles, which is second to the New York-Newark area in the volume of imported items it receives, there are only nine inspectors to handle an estimated 9,000 shipments every month, including foods, drugs, medical devices and other items, subcommittee sources said. Further, they said, inspectors in Los Angeles physically examine only four of 4,500 shipments of canned foods that enter every month. The rest is done through paper work, by making sure that the overseas facilities are registered with the FDA, the subcommittee said.

But subcommittee investigators said that a registration number is no guarantee that the products that the plant produces are safe. “It’s easy to obtain a registration number,” one subcommittee investigator said. “All you have to do is fill out a piece of paper. It does not involve any inspections.”

There are more than 3,000 facilities around the world that have registered with the FDA to produce low-acid canned foods, he said, and the FDA has performed only 31 overseas inspections of these facilities during the last five years. All 14 of the plants inspected in 1988 failed, he said, but only two were placed on a probationary status known as “automatic detention.”

Deadly Canned Fish

Subcommittee investigators said that one Manila plant that produced canned fish was inspected by military medical officers in 1987 after the company applied for permission to sell its goods to the Defense Department. The inspectors wrote in a report, obtained by the subcommittee, that the plant was “capable of causing serious illness and death to consumers of their products.” The military turned its findings over to the FDA, which sent its own investigators to confirm what the military had found. The FDA immediately placed the company on automatic detention.

However, the subcommittee said, by last month, the Manila plant was returned to normal status without a follow-up inspection.

When a firm is placed under “automatic detention,” its products are supposed to be detained when they arrive until they can be examined, the subcommittee said. But products often reach local importers before they can be stopped and are released into commerce.