An attempt to rework US food-safety regulations will fail without sufficient funds.

As an example of the absurdity of US food-safety regulations, consider the humble egg. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) monitors the chickens that produce them and grades the eggs according to their quality. The safety of those (intact) eggs is scrutinized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Once cracked open and used to make a product, the egg comes back under USDA jurisdiction. If that product is then used as an ingredient to make yet another food, responsibility for ensuring its safety again rests with the FDA. Unless, of course, that egg-based food is a meat product — then the USDA remains in charge.

US lawmakers waded into this arcane system late last year when they passed the biggest overhaul of the US food-safety system in more than 70 years. The Food Safety Modernization Act, signed into law on 4 January, aims to shore up the FDA side of food-safety regulation, giving the agency expanded authority to conduct inspections and to pull contaminated products from the market. The law also expands the government's role in the prevention of food-borne illnesses, rather than simply reacting to outbreaks on a case-by-case basis. Farms and food manufacturers will now be required to identify potential hazards in their manufacturing process — anything from bacterial contamination to metal screws that could fall off equipment and into food — and develop plans to prevent them.

“It is curious that a bill that won bipartisan support should now face starvation at the hands of an appropriations committee.”

But by the time President Barack Obama had signed the act, some in the House of Representatives were already threatening to drag the new law into the budgetary battle brewing on Capitol Hill. Critics, who include Representative Jack Kingston (Republican, Georgia), the lead Republican on the subcommittee that oversees the FDA's budget, have threatened to underfund the law. They argue that the cost of the regulations — US$1.4 billion over the next five years — outweighs the benefits.

Their sums are short-sighted: the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington DC estimates that food-borne illnesses cost the United States $152 billion a year, not including the cost to industry in lost sales and lawsuits when outbreaks surface. The investment seems a sound strategy.

It is curious that a bill that won bipartisan support should now face starvation at the hands of an appropriations committee, but it is an old story for the FDA. Famously overstretched, the agency's budget has failed to keep pace with the expansion of its mandate.

Without adequate funding for inspectors, the food-safety law will have no teeth. The new law also calls for funds to sponsor food-safety research. In the absence of that money, the underfunded and over-extended National Institute of Food and Agriculture shoulders the bulk of such projects. That institute faces a budget crisis of its own: its competitive research grants programme is authorized to receive $700 million. It got $262 million in 2010, and its budget in 2011 is uncertain.

Meanwhile, improving food safety is not only a question of money. As is often the case between government agencies, communication between the FDA and the USDA is notoriously lacking. Last September, for example, The Wall Street Journal reported that USDA inspectors noted filthy conditions at Wright County Egg, a huge producer in Galt, Iowa, when they arrived to grade its eggs, but failed to inform the FDA about the possible food-safety risk. A Salmonella outbreak leading to the recall of hundreds of millions of eggs was later traced back to that farm, as well as to another.

The barriers to better communication are clearly surmountable: in 1995, the FDA, USDA and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, worked together to create PulseNet, a contaminant alert system that tracks the genetic fingerprints of bacteria found in food. The programme alerts officials when the incidence of any one bacterial strain rises above background levels. PulseNet allowed regulators to track down the spinach behind a 2006 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 food poisoning that made more than 200 people ill. The programme has attracted international collaborators as well. It is a food-safety success story made possible by careful coordination among agencies, and it is a story worth chewing over.

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