Imported Food Safety Jeopardized by Independent Labs or FDA?

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Imported Food Safety Jeopardized by Independent Labs or FDA?

May 27th, 2008 amy

Last fall the FDA issued an alert on five types of Chinese seafood: eel, shrimp, catfish, basa and dace. To import those seafoods, companies affected by the alert must prove that their products don’t contain banned substances. Conducting tests to prove it is one of the jobs the private labs perform. Now a congressional committee is investigating whether some private U.S. laboratories were instructed to withhold samples of tainted food so that importers could get their goods into the United States. In a May 1 letter to ten labs, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce suggests they may have been encouraged by importing companies to discard test results that had failed Food and Drug Administration standards.

“We’re gathering information from both the FDA and private industry about the labs almost being complicit in helping importers game the system,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee that is investigating the labs and food companies. “Someone told us you pay for the result you want to get from the labs.”

The committee’s letter reiterates Stupak’s suspicion that testing on some samples was conducted repeatedly until the food passed. In other instances, the letter says, importers whose food failed tests at one laboratory would hire a different lab to continue testing until they got a positive result.

So far, just 2 of the 10 labs targeted by the House committee have complied with the records request, the Chicago Tribune reports.

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