WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, released the following written statement as part of an Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing entitled, “The Recent Salmonella Outbreak: Lessons Learned and Consequences to Industry and Public Health”:
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the prompt response to this problem and the hearing today, and our witnesses for being here. We’ve invited 16 witnesses to tell us what went right and what went wrong in the search for the source in the latest salmonella outbreak in fresh produce. Nearly everybody seems to think more went wrong than right, but we need to explore the complex realities if we’re really going to try to fix the problem.
“First of all, we want to know why it took so long to figure out that it was Mexican peppers instead of American tomatoes that were making people sick. Many innocent tomato farmers in the United States lost thousands and thousands of dollars because we had first identified tomatoes and it hurt their crop.
“You don’t have to be a detective to know that the initial investigation didn’t really help anybody and as I just said, it did harm a lot of people. I understand that the investigators follow clues until they find the culprit, but it’s arguable that our public health agencies should have found the source of contamination much sooner than they did. They identified tomatoes, according to this timeline, Mr. Chairman, in early June and we really didn’t begin to identify jalapenos until late June. And it wasn’t until July that Minnesota authorities actually pinpointed jalapenos as the source of the salmonella illnesses. That’s a month that really hurt in terms of the tomato-crop situation. The point of doing trace-back and spending millions of taxpayers dollars is to contain an outbreak quickly and prevent any future contamination. The first response to this outbreak fingered the tomato industry and caused growers all across America to suffer a devastating loss.
“This hearing will also examine a portion of the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, which required the Food and Drug Administration to establish procedures on trace-back and record-keeping. The rationale behind passing the act was to enable federal investigators to have access to records that could help ‘trace-back’ and lead quickly to the source of contamination during an outbreak.
“This is important to meet these regulations so the records kept by those who manufacture, process, pack, transport, distribute, receive, hold or import food need to clearly identify the immediate previous sources and subsequent recipients of food. If the records kept by industry are not meeting these standards, and the trace-back and trace-forward process is not being achieved, then industry needs to tell us and regulators need to find a way to improve compliance. However, if industry is meeting these standards and it is the regulations themselves that are limiting our regulators, then perhaps a change in law or regulation may be needed. I’m really not interested in trying to find a bad guy in this story. I want to get it right. If the current system is broken, let’s figure out what’s wrong with it and fix it together. If it just needs a tune-up, then let’s start tuning it up.
Mr. Chairman, I’ve got three more pages of specifics but I’ll submit those for the record. Let me simply say that this is an important hearing and I know that my folks down in Texas are very interested in this and as I just said, let’s figure out what’s broken and fix it, or let’s figure out what needs to be tuned up and tune it up.
