63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read - Jesse Ventura [22]
Here is the first of several of the U.S. embassy cables that caught my eye. It’s our State Department reporting about a senior Spanish prosecutor looking into organized crime, who says that Russia has become a virtual “Mafia state” with the Kremlin using mob bosses to carry out its wishes. I’ve only included excerpts here.
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THE FDA’S BLIND SIDLE
Our Food Supply Imperiled by Lack of Inspections
I can’t say I was surprised to read in this report how little attention is being paid to what’s going on with our factory farms and feedlots. I’ve known about this problem since I was governor. The simple fact is, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t I have the manpower. They tell you they’re conducting these inspections, but nobody is actually out there checking to conducting these inspections, but nobody is actually out there checking to make sure.
The reality is, the conditions by which our food is being supplied to us are very dangerous. Consider that more than half a billion eggs were recalled last year and a salmonella outbreak in August made about 1,700 people sick. Preventable food-borne illness hits about 76 million Americans every year—325,000 become hospitalized and 5,000 die from eating tainted food!
It all comes back to the same old thing: this is what happens when corporations, in this case agribusiness, take over. It simply becomes bottom line, money, and profits—everything else be damned. There is a staph infection that’s antibiotic-resistant and widely present in our vast hog and chicken factories. It’s called ST398, and the reason it’s a huge problem is because those animals are getting daily doses of antibiotics—which make them grow faster (more bang for the buck) and keep them alive in the stressful and unsanitary conditions where they’re raised.
You’d think that the federal regulators would want to keep tabs on this, but for years the FDA looked the other way and wouldn’t even calculate estimates of how much antibiotics the livestock industry is using. Finally, in December 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General released a report—it turned out to be 29 million pounds of antibiotics in 2009! And that, my friends, is a veritable shitload. Here are a few excepts from “FDA Inspections of Domestic Food Facilities” (April 2010).
BACKGROUND
Each year, more than 300,000 Americans are hospitalized and 5,000 die after consuming contaminated foods and beverages. Recent high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illness have raised serious questions about FDA’s inspections process and its ability to protect the Nation’s food supply. The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry requested that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) review the extent to which FDA conducts food facility inspections and identifies violations.
FDA inspects food facilities to ensure food safety and compliance with regulations. During an inspection, FDA inspectors may identify potential violations of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act as well as other applicable laws and regulations. Based on the outcome of the inspection, FDA assigns a facility one of three classifications: official action indicated (OAI), voluntary action indicated (VAI), or no action indicated (NAI). In addition, FDA may choose to change a facility’s initial classification to another classification under certain circumstances.
FDA relies on several approaches to determine whether a facility corrected the violations found by inspectors. FDA may review evidence provided by a food facility describing any completed corrective actions. FDA may also reinspect