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 May 8, 2002 |
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In a report released on May 1, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, said that U.S. schools are experiencing increasing numbers of food-borne illness outbreaks, but labyrinthine bureaucratic red tape and federal laws impede the government's ability to protect children from harm. In response, Bush administration officials announced reforms in the school lunch program, claiming to give schools more access to information about the safety of factories that provide student meals. The GAO reported that the number of food-related outbreaks reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) has doubled over the last decade, and generally increased an average of 10 percent per year. At a joint Senate-House hearing on how lapses in federal oversight has allowed contaminated meals to reach students, Lawrence Dyckman, an official with the GAO, testified that the CDCP recorded 292 separate incidences of food poisoning between 1990 and 1999, affecting nearly 16,000 school children. "Our analysis clearly shows an increasing trend," Dyckman said. Cheryl Roberts, a mother of a 15-year-old who suffered kidney failure in 1998 after eating an E-coli contaminated school lunch hamburger said, "Victims are too often treated like second-class citizens by health officials whose main interest is covering up for any misdeeds. " Roberts went on to say that the government priority of low prices above safety has "resulted in school lunches becoming a dumping ground for ground beef and other agricultural products of questionable safety." Industry-backed confidentiality rules block state and county officials from getting company shipping records so they can trace the food and protect the students from further harm. In addition, the three federal agencies involved in school food contamination - the USDA, the FDA and the CDCP - do not share vital information with each other. Elsa Murano, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for food safety, testified that the agency is adopting new rules that will allow it to share food company records with other agencies and local officials who purchase food for schools. "This will go a long way" toward improving the response to food-born illnesses, Murano said. About 17 percent of school meals are donated to schools by the USDA through a $5.7 billion buyout program that aims to boost farm markets. Local school administrators, however, usually cannot get access to safety information about the manufacturers from whom they purchase products. Rep. Jan Schakowski (D-IL) called for establishing a national food inspection database that would be available to school districts. "One of the key ingredients in making school lunches safer is to provide local school lunch districts with better information with which to make decisions. This can be done today," she testified. Schakowski continued that schools "often buy unknowingly from firms with a long history of safety violations. The federal government should be providing not just money and goods to local school systems, but the information they need to protect our children." Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest concurred that federal agencies need the authority to order recalls and trace food. John Bode, however, an attorney for the National Food Processors Association, said, "There is absolutely no evidence that a change in organizational structure would result in safer food." Bode recommended instead that the federal government permit irradiation of the food it buys, something that many food safety advocates oppose because it has not been extensively studied. |
General Accounting Office Finds School Lunches Unsafe