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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealed some troubling news over the past week. Due to staff cuts, it is suspending a quality control program for its food testing laboratories and a quality control program for testing of fluid milk and other dairy products.
According to Reuters, staff cuts of as many as 20,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services are responsible for the suspension of the proficiency testing program of the FDA’s Food Emergency Response Network (FERN). This testing, according to Reuters, “is designed to ensure consistency and accuracy across the agency’s network of about 170 labs that test food for pathogens and contaminants to prevent food-borne illness.”
“Unfortunately, significant reductions in force, including a key quality assurance officer, an analytical chemist, and two microbiologists at FDA’s Human Food Program Moffett Center have an immediate and significant impact on the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) Proficiency Testing (PT) Program,” reads an email seen by Reuters from FERN’s National Program Office.
The program will be suspended at least through September 30 and means the agency will be unable to do planned quality control work around lab testing for the parasite Cyclospora in spinach or the pesticide glyphosate in barley, among other tests, the email says.
On top of that, just a few days later, Reuters reports, it was revealed that the Food and Drug Administration that, again, because of staff cuts, it will be suspending its proficiency testing program for Grade “A” raw milk and finished products because FDA’s Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, part of its division overseeing food safety, “is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis.”
The FDA’s proficiency testing programs ensure consistency and accuracy across the nation’s network of food safety laboratories. Laboratories also rely on those quality control tests to meet standards for accreditation.
Earlier this month, the FDA suspended its program to improve bird flu testing, due to staff cuts. “(The program) would have been critical to ensure confidence in the laboratory methods for food safety and animal health,” an FDA email seen by Reuters stated.
The FDA also closed an investigation earlier this month into an E. coli in romaine lettuce outbreak that spread across 15 states without notifying the public.
How these and other moves will, as Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has claimed, will “Make America Healthy Again,” is yet to be determined.