Feb. 27, 2007 - 21:43 MST

THOSE WHO WOULD SEND A MESSAGE

It would seem they are trying to do away with the little Dutch boy Stop-Leak. There's an article in today's The Rocky Mountain News by Andrew Bridges of The Associated Press which might be an indication of such a thing. Quoted here in full:

FOOD-SAFETY REVIEWS DOWN BY HALF AT FDA

WASHINGTON -- "The federal agency that's been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half of the food-safety inspections it did three years ago."

"The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite high-profile food recalls."

"We have a food safety crisis on the horizon," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia."

"Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food-safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a data-base analysis of federal records by The Associated Press."

"That's not all that's dropping at the FDA in terms of food safety. The Analysis also shows:

## "12 percent fewer FDA employees in field offices who concentrate on food issues."

## "Safety tests for U.S.Produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency's own statistics."

"After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FDA, at the urging of Congress, increased the number of food inspectors and inspections amid fears that the nation's food system was vulnerable to terrorists."

"Inspectors and inspections spiked in 2003, but now both have fallen enough to erase the gains."

"The Bush administration's budget request for 2008 an additional $10.6 million for food safety at the FDA; the lobbying group said 10 times that increase is needed."

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So, what does this article actually mean ? What were the safety inspections prior to Sept. 11 ?How effective were they then ?

Who are the lobbyists, and for whom do they work ?

Seems that the contaminated spinach and now the peanut butter salmonella bit indicate that our FDA is falling down on the job somewhere.

Yet this kind of article puts me off. Seems to me that much more information should have been rendered before slapping us with an article like this.

One's first (possibly mistaken) instinctive feeling is that the biggies idea is first kill THOSE WHO WOULD SEND A MESSAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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