FOOD SUPPLY SAFETY

How Can the Safety of the US Food Supply Be Improved?

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Objective4

Importance of the Topic4

Thesis Statement4

Management Systems Food Safety5

U.S-New Food Act Sets Out Requirements for Exporters of Fruits And Vegetables8

Features and Functions8

Implementation9

Special Requirements9

Prohibition or Suspension of the Product10

Exceptions11

Study Approach11

What Did The Study Find?12

Highlights of Main Findings and Recommendations13

Findings13

Recommendations14

Conclusion15

References17

How Can the Safety of the US Food Supply Be Improved?

Introduction

The contaminated food with pathogens bacteria, viruses or parasites makes one out of every six people sick in the U.S. Most of the people who suffer from illness have mild symptoms and recover quickly often with no medical attention at all. However, some cases are extremely serious and send over 100,000 people to the hospital and kill an estimated 3,000 per year. Federal, state and local government agencies all have a role in keeping the nation's food supply safe (Shames 2011). They are charged with regulating hundreds of thousands of growers, producers, distributors, grocery stores and restaurants that provide Americans with massive quantities of food each year. But these food safety agencies regulate different foods, operate using different rules and often have different priorities. That fragmented oversight of an admittedly complex system allows contaminated foods to slip through and sicken consumers.

The General Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences and other expert groups have called on two federal agencies charged with food safety the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to take steps to address those problems at least at the federal level. Experts say the FDA and USDA often work in a piecemeal fashion, reacting to the outbreak of the day rather than taking steps to prevent safety problems. They are urging the FDA and USDA to adopt a more unified, preventative and risk-based approach to the most pressing food safety problems. A risk-based approach to food safety requires the agencies to target limited budget resources to better protect the health of American consumers (Proctor 2011). To do that, regulators first need to identify which pathogens in which foods make people sick most often.

Right now, the agencies rely on various data, in particular estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the annual number of illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths associated with specific pathogens. However, the CDC's estimates do not pair pathogens with specific foods, a shortfall that means regulators do not know the foods or pathogen-food combinations to target with safety measures. Moreover, these counts of acute illness do not include the long-term consequences of food-related illness, such as kidney failure or paralysis.

Objective

The objective of the study is to find out the possible means of the safety in the U.S food supply. The study analyzes the management system of the U.S food supply. Different ways of how the food supply can be made safe and reliable to the customers has also been analyzed in the study.

Importance of the Topic

The topic of the study that is ...