The Tainted Tomato Travesty

NBC News chief science correspondent Robert Bazell tells us here that that mystery of the salmonella-tainted tomatoes will likely remain exactly that…

The FDA and the CDC, the agencies responsible for the investigation, said that tainted tomatoes remain “the lead suspect,” and offered their recommendations on what kinds of tomatoes you should avoid and what is safe to eat. You can see those recommendations here.

But in a conference call with reporters Tuesday, government investigators grew increasingly testy as more and more outside experts criticize their efforts.

"I just think they're really screwing this one up," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a professor at the University of Minnesota and Minnesota's former state epidemiologist, who has discovered the source of tomato contamination in other outbreaks.

Osterholm says the current investigation has been characterized by a lack of cooperation and communication among agencies, as well as some faulty methodologies—especially the failure to do "case control" studies as they look for the source of this rare salmonella strain.

(More info is here.)

You know, as bad as this is, I would hate to think of what would happen if we suffered an even more widespread outbreak of some worse pathogen traveling through our food, air, or water.

And even a modest examination of the root cases here yields the following: this link takes you to a report from the Committee on Government Reform now headed by Henry Waxman about FDA weaknesses under Bushco (he was the ranking minority member at the time this was published). And it identifies “the usual suspects”; declining FDA budgets, declining food safety inspections, and inadequate enforcement and regulatory action.

Also, from here…

Although the FDA claims that there are procedures in place to resolve disagreements, employees continue to say that they experience intimidation and reassignments when they raise issues about the integrity of the FDA's work. In fact, the UCS survey found that over one-third of the scientists said they could not openly express any concerns about public health within the FDA without fear of retaliation.

Congressman (Maurice) Hinchey (D-NY) released a statement on June 24, 2006, in response to the report, which he said, "shed light on the serious and widespread problems at the FDA."

"One of the more disturbing findings of the study," he said, "is that more than half of the scientists at the FDA said their job satisfaction has decreased over the past few years during President Bush's time in office."

"Under this president," he noted, "the FDA has decided to let politics overrule science."

"Water wet, sky blue" I know, but it bears repeating.

We saw it with the way in which Vioxx, Bextra, and other drugs were mismanaged, Rep. Hinchey stated, and "in the agency's repeated efforts to preempt state law in order to minimize drug company accountability under former Counsel Daniel Troy."

And this prior post tells us of allegations concerning another possibly flawed safety study used by FDA head Andrew von Eschenbach when testing the drug Ketek, with his agency allowing a researcher convicted of fraud to conduct one of the studies.

And what of the CDC? Well, this other prior post tells us that agency head Dr. Julie Gerberding instituted a bonus program to reward top officials at the expense of the agency’s scientists (I’m sure morale soared after that). And to say they were slow to react when the matter of formaldehyde in FEMA’s trailers became public is an understatement.

I know some of these links are from 2006 and 2007, but the same people have been running these agencies since that time. Given that, I honestly don’t expect that the “culture” in these agencies has changed one bit.

Let’s just hope and pray that we can manage to hang on until we’re governed by adults again and responsible people are put in charge; government is only “the enemy” when we make it so by refusing to oversee those we elect to office as well as the ones those elected choose to appoint to run the agencies tasked with ensuring our safety.