FDA Food Safety Report

food protection that is mostly managed by FDA faces significant challenges that need to be addressed. The FDA lack mandatory food recall authority. The FDA has mandated authority to seize misbranded and adulterated foods as well as detain food articles that are evidently causing serious health consequences (Neal, Binkley & Henroid, 2012). However, it lacks direct authority to order detection or recall foods because such action must be carried out through courts. The lack of direct mandate to order recall lead to delayed protection of the public health from adulterated and misbranded foods the process (Institute of Medicine (U.S.), Wallace, & Oria, 2010). Similarly, when producers issue a recall suspected to be contaminated, the FDA and USDA

have no mechanism that they can use to track whether the recall is effective or accounting for the products that have been recalled. The FDA has also no mandate to order the timelines for the recalls. According to a port released by GAO in 2004, the time taken by the FDA to verify whether a product is recalled would be equal the shelf life of the recalled products (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) et al., 2010).
The FDA also faces problems related to lack of research and IT strategic planning.

The agency lacks an overarching strategic plan to help it address it retail food safety missions. The efforts of FDA to modernize as well as enhance its plan is inefficient and uncoordinated, thus minimizing the food safety programs (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) et al., 2010). The FDA lacks clearly stated mission, goals as well as performance metrics and therefore cannot align itself with a direction, measure its performance as well as determine the effectiveness of its programs (Neal et al., 2012). While the FDA lacks enough resources to carry out its mandates, it lacks clear goals make it operation ineffective. For example, without proper goals, it cannot determine the level of expertise required for its new staffs as well as the capability of the laboratories it

requires.
The FDA and other agencies handling retail food safety adequate IT infrastructure. The FDA has made some strides in addressing the issues of inadequate made progress in addressing this deficiency by hiring new staff, forming internal IT infrastructure through forming internal Boards to Govern IT, hiring new staffs, updating it management system, and collaborating with other agencies. However, its IT infrastructure still faces challenges supporting its public health mission (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) et al., 2010). The IT infrastructure faces problems such as low quality of data (non-standardized), inconsistent collection of data across it different centers, lack of integration of IT system with its various centers, delay in data sharing, as well as antiquated hardware. The lack of proper IT infrastructure leads to inefficiency because of the duplication of effort among the agencies dealing with the retail food safety.
The protection of retail food system in the U.S also faces gaps that prevent effective implementation of food safety with the gap occurring in imported and on-farm food safety. Most foods supply in the U.S and particularly retail foods come from abroad. However, FDA inspects only 2% of the imported foods. The gap leaves a considerable security threat to retail foods. FDA also faces challenges to verify food safety for on-farms because farms are exempted from the records keeping and registration requirement. The lack of proper records limits the FDA ability to trace the safety of the food items. FDA as retail food protection agency also lacks proper funding to carry out its mission. The FDA regulated products comprise 75% of the consumer expenditure. However, 60% of the funding is directed to USDA. The higher funding on USDA is due to the federal requirement that it carry out a daily inspection of poultry and meat processing plants.

Recommendation Solutions to the Problems
The FDA should restructure its IT infrastructure to ensure that it uses consistent data collection, sharing of data and integrate IT system with other food safety agencies as well as using standardized data in its research.

Effective IT system would reduce the duplication of effort between it and other food safety agencies. There is a need for it to continue updating it hardware by removing the obsolete ones (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) et al., 2010). There is a need for the U.S Congress to increase the FDA mandate to recall products that pose threat to public health directly without going through the court process. Strengthening FDA by giving direct recall or detection may help the agency prevent contaminated foods from reaching the shelf of retail stores and causing significant food-related illness. It would reduce the time the agency requires to verify, detect and detain misbranded and adulterated foods heading to the retail market. the law should allow the FDA to inspect more than 2% of the consumer goods imported from other countries because the majority of the foods particularly seas foods fall under FDA jurisdiction (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) et al., 2010). The lack of proper records and registration by farms reduced the capacity of FDA to trace the safety of foods going to retail stores from on-farms. The methods used by most of the food protection are outdated and cannot be used to detect and curb the current microbial pathogens that cause food poisoning. Thus,

there is a need for continuous innovation and change on verification approaches used to verify retail food items for contamination. Therefore, there is a need for a policy to ensure that farms keep proper records of their produces to ensure traceability.