Clinton Plans Program to Improve Food Safety

WASHINGTON — President Clinton will announce a $43-million plan today to improve food safety through more rigorous testing, better training for inspectors and additional research, the White House said Friday.

The plan, to be announced in Clinton’s weekly radio address, also will consist of improved measures to prevent the spread of food-borne diseases after they are discovered, including an expansion of the nation’s network of regional food surveillance laboratories, where researchers can move swiftly to determine the cause of an outbreak.

“The president will be announcing a system that will help catch and respond to outbreaks of food-borne illness earlier and to help give us the data to prevent future outbreaks,” said White House spokeswoman Mary Ellen Glynn.

In July, Clinton had announced a new system of guarding against bacteria in meat and poultry by relying more on scientific tests and less on touch, sight and smell.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, praised Clinton on Friday for recognizing that food safety has often been neglected.

“These funds are a badly needed shot in the arm” for the Food and Drug Administration, DeWaal said. “Although this measure isn’t sufficient to solve the problems in food safety, it is a tremendous step forward.”

The $43 million would be divided among the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FDA and the Department of Agriculture.

The FDA would receive the bulk of the money, approximately $23 million, for research into food-borne illnesses and training of food inspectors and for improving seafood-testing procedures.

Clinton’s plan would spend $11.5 million on the regional food surveillance labs, with the CDC spending $10 million of that amount to establish three additional sites. Labs already exist in Northern California, Oregon, Minnesota, Georgia and Connecticut. New sites have not been selected.

The Department of Agriculture would receive the remaining $8.5 million to help it carry out new guidelines that take effect Monday. The guidelines require meatpackers to perform more rigorous checks of their products--including for the E. coli bacteria, which have caused a series of illnesses across the United States in recent years.

Clinton hopes that the additional funding, which must be approved by Congress, would improve communications between the agencies responsible for food safety. Dane Bernard, vice president of Food Safety Programs of the National Food Processors Assn., praised the proposed increase in funding.

“I support any effort by the government to strengthen the regulatory effort--this is a good sign,” Bernard said.