Hold the Bioterrorism

Though you’ll probably never know what’s actually in your Happy Meal, it’d be nice to rule out anthrax. Concerns over bioterrorism affecting the food supply have led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to solicit help from companies to develop a new system to track and model the flow of food.

The FDA has made a request for information in response to language in the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002. The act charged the FDA with improving its information management systems so that it could better detect and respond to intentional food tampering.

The act describes two possible systems: one to track food shipments, and one to model the flow and consumption of food, according to Morris Potter of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The food-tracking system would work with proposed regulations from the FDA requiring food companies to standardize recordkeeping. That would relieve FDA investigators of having to comb through invoices to track contaminated food back to its source. With standardized records maintained in a system under FDA governance, regulators could quickly reconstruct the food path. The new food-modeling system proposed in the FDA’s request for information would help the agency determine the cause of outbreaks and their effects.

“That data could then help the FDA model its response to outbreaks in different populations, putting the right number of inspectors in the right places,” Potter says.

The food industry has already voiced opposition to the FDA’s proposed reporting rule changes, citing the cost of implementing the new reporting requirements, and the private sector has voiced concerns about the FDA owning their customer information as part of the food-tracking system.