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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand Wants FDA To Enforce The Rules On Food Safety

December 12, 2018

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand says that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that three million New Yorkers get sick from foodborne illnesses each year. According to the senator, every year, 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne disease. In a press telephone call held on Tuesday, Gillibrand spoke of how her food safety law, passed back in 2012, which called for stricter rules for stores to do food product recalls and pulling products from shelves, has not been well enforced by the Food and Drug Administration.

“Food recalls are the last chance for food safety regulators to remove dangerous food from grocery stores and let consumers know that they may have purchased tainted food that could cause a food-borne illness,” said Gillibrand. The legislation Gillibrand passed as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) would require grocery stores to tell consumers if they had purchased recalled items that could potentially make them sick. The law requires grocery stores to display recall notifications where shoppers will see them or notify shoppers through the contact information available through their customer loyalty cards so that they do not have to monitor news reports or government notification websites to learn about contaminated food. Gillibrand will call on the Trump Administration to immediately implement these long-overdue regulations to proactively inform consumers about potential food safety risks lurking in their pantries and freezers.


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