February 1, 2004 The Sunday Oregonian by MICHELLE COLE and BRENT WALTH

When he first ran for president, George W. Bush ridiculed the inefficient way the U.S. government safeguarded the food Americans eat.

"There's one agency that inspects cheese pizza. There's another that inspects pepperoni pizza," Bush said in a 2000 campaign speech. "Apparently the revolutionary idea that maybe these functions could be combined hasn't dawned on anyone yet."

But when candidate Bush became President Bush, the notion of a single food inspection agency looked a lot more revolutionary. The food industry lobbied the White House to keep things as they were, and it prevailed, despite pleas from scientists, government auditors and consumer advocates.

Now the nation's first case of mad cow disease has drawn new attention to the gaps and inconsistencies. The concept of a single agency to oversee the nation's food supply -- something akin to a Department of Homeland Security for food -- surfaced last week during a hearing of the U.S. Senate's Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee.

"This should be a wake-up call," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a longtime advocate of food safety reform.

Experts have long warned that the food safety system is a patchwork of outdated rules and laws -- and at times competing agencies -- failing to adequately protect the public. More recently, Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has said a unified food safety system deserves study. Today a dozen federal agencies carry out more than three dozen laws, some nearly a century old. The result:

* Agencies compete. In the mid-1980s, public health officials noted a disturbing increase in disease outbreaks tied to salmonella enteritidis, a bacterium found in eggs and infected chickens. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with jurisdiction over the chicken industry, and the Food and Drug Administration, with authority over the egg industry, took more than a decade to agree upon a poultry and egg-handling strategy.

* Some foods are inspected thoroughly; others, hardly at all. USDA inspectors are present each day at meat and poultry slaughterhouses and processing operations. Fruit and vegetable handlers, however, might not see an FDA inspector for years.

* Fragmented responsibilities lead to inconsistency. In the recent mad cow case, the USDA exerted its authority on the slaughter and distribution of meat, quickly issuing new rules to keep "downer" cattle -- animals too sick to stand -- out of the human food supply. But the FDA regulates livestock feed, implicated as the root cause of mad cow disease, and took a month to announce its own new rules limiting protein-based feeds.

"It underscores that there are lots of agencies involved. Whenever that happens, you're going to have contradictions and delays and slippage," said Tim Hammonds, president and CEO of the Food Marketing Institute, an association of food wholesalers and retailers favoring reform. "Every time we have a crisis it drives home the point that we're really not as well-equipped to deal with this as we should be."

The system isn't perfect, agrees Timothy Willard, spokesman for the National Food Processors Association, another industry trade group. But Willard argues that it is not worth it to add "a new layer of bureaucracy with additional costs that could slow down some responses to food safety incidents."

"We have one of the safest food supplies in the world," he said.

Even so, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that contaminated food sickens 76 million people each year. About 325,000 people are hospitalized, and 5,000 die.

The safeguards that protect Americans from tainted foods date to reforms inspired by Upton Sinclair's 1906 book "The Jungle," which launched investigations of Chicago meatpacking plants.

The system "just built up without any sort of strategic questioning of how it fits together," said Michael Taylor, administrator of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service from 1994 to 1996 and a former FDA deputy commissioner.

Agencies slow to fight outbreaks

Advocates of combining the nation's food-inspection efforts cite disturbing health risks. They point specifically to outbreaks in the mid-1980s of salmonella enteritidis.

A report released by CDC last month said there have been 29,000 foodborne illnesses and 65 deaths from salmonella enteritidis since 1985 and that undercooked eggs were the "major risk factor" for the disease. The same report noted, however, the number of cases fell by half between 1995 and 1999 and that deaths "have declined dramatically."

A 1997 report from one advocacy group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, found that federal agencies had "competed with each other (and) stumbled over each other" for more than a decade while salmonella enteritidis spread.

It took until the late 1990s for federal agencies to pass rules and produce a joint strategy. In the meantime, Ken Klippen, vice president of government relations for United Egg Producers, a national trade organization, says the egg industry took steps to reduce salmonella enteritidis without federal action.

A 2003 National Academy of Sciences report concluded the current steps helped but have been inadequate to control the spread of the bacteria.

"It's truly a chicken and egg problem," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

"USDA regulates the chicken; FDA, the eggs. . . . We would have had a faster response if all of these responsibilities were in one agency."

This year, the U.S. government will spend more than $1 billion on food safety programs. Critics, including the General Accounting Office, contend that the government does not spend the greatest amount of food safety dollars where there's greatest risk.

The USDA employs 7,610 inspectors and veterinarians to oversee 6,500 meat and poultry slaughterhouses and processing plants. The agency's budget for food safety in fiscal year 2004 tops $784 million.

This year, the FDA will spend little more than half that amount -- $411 million -- on food safety. The agency employs about 900 inspectors responsible for 420,000 food handlers, processors and transporters worldwide.

Different authority, different inspections

The difference between the two agencies, both in funding and authority, means the USDA is on the premises when meat is slaughtered in federally regulated plants and its inspectors visit foreign meat and poultry plants before their products are allowed into the United States. The FDA, in contrast, does not conduct daily or, in most cases, even annual inspections of the food establishments it oversees. The agency cannot send investigators into another country without permission of foreign leadership.

Food safety experts note that the globalization of the nation's food supply brings in not only cheaper foods, but also contaminants not normally found in the United States. Of the 6 million food imports last year, the FDA checked just 79,000 samples.

Analyzing spending and reported foodborne illnesses in 1999, the GAO found that the USDA spent $712 million to regulate foods that accounted for 15 percent of the reported illnesses. The FDA spent $283 million to oversee foods that accounted for 85 percent of the reported foodborne illnesses.

Dan Glickman, agriculture secretary under President Clinton, said USDA inspectors should inspect other foods as well as meats.

"You'd like to be able to move your resources around where the threats are, and right now we can't do that," he said.

Glickman was part of a presidential food safety council that recommended the government consider a unified food safety system. The council issued its report Jan. 19, 2001, the day before Clinton left office. The council has not reconvened under the Bush administration.

Congress has since created a new U.S. Food Safety Commission as part of the 2002 farm bill and charged the panel with reviewing the current system with an eye toward consolidation and legislative reform. But the White House never appointed commission members, and Congress never funded it.

Carol Tucker Foreman, a former USDA assistant secretary overseeing meat safety and now director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, says there have been "pitched battles" over food safety consolidation for years.

"None of the agencies want to give up their authority, and no one in the food industry wants any scenario that creates more inspection of food," she said.

Following the outbreak of mad cow disease in the United Kingdom, Britain brought its food safety programs under one agency. Canada and Denmark also have taken similar steps.

"It's only a matter of time before we catch up to what other countries are doing," said DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The question is if we can take these steps now or wait for the crisis that knocks our current system over."

Michelle Cole: 503-294-5143; michellecole@news.oregonian.com Brent Walth: 503-294-5072; brentwalth@news.oregonian.com