Report on FDA reporting:
By Neil Sherman                                                 
HealthSCOUT Reporter

FRIDAY, Oct. 29 (HealthSCOUT) -- When milk is bad,
cribs hurt children, or store-bought cookies trigger
allergies, you may have to rely on the maker to find out
about the problem. Government agencies that oversee
the recall of defective products rely on corporate good
citizenship to alert the public about problems. This can
sometimes lead to delays of days or even months.

"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn’t
consider it their purpose to notify people of hazardous
foods," says Todd Smith, vice president of
SafetyAlerts.com in Troy, Mich. "If it isn’t their job,
whose job is it?" SafetyAlerts.com is a watchdog site
that publishes recall information.

"There is no provision in our laws for the FDA to recall
a product," says Joe Baca, director of the Office of Field
Programs for the FDA’s Center for Food Safety &
Applied Nutrition in Washington. "Recalls are voluntary
procedures." He adds, "we only put a recall in our
enforcement report once the smoke clears."

A typical FDA Enforcement Report, published every
week, may list almost two dozen recalls on products that
range from pastry to frozen blood and medical
diagnostic devices. Most of the recalls are minor and
don’t pose much harm to the public. A typical report
had only two recalls (undeclared nuts in cookies and
harmful bacteria in cheese) that were Class I, meaning
potentially deadly.

This FDA report comes from letters, faxes or press
releases from companies. Like the tree falling in the
forest, however, if the company doesn’t tell the FDA,
then the public may not hear about it.

Because the FDA relies on companies to voluntarily
recall a product, there can be delays. For instance, the
company told the FDA on July 23, 1999, that it was
recalling 17,000 gallons of milk contaminated with a drug
residue. The recall, however, didn’t appear on the
publicly available FDA Enforcement Report until Oct. 20,
a gap of almost three months.