A bipartisan collection of Senators got visits from food poisoning victims--or their surviving family members--this afternoon, as part of a campaign to get meaningful food safety legislation passed in the Senate. During their visits, the food safety advocates, who are members of the Make Our Food Safe organization, passed out an info sheet about what meaningful legislation actually means, as well as packages that contained t-shirts with food poisoning attorney Bill Marler's Put a Trial Lawyer Out of Business logo. Currently, there are four different food safety Bills under consideration by the Senate, in various stages of hearing and mark up. Any meaningful legislation that gets enacted should include mandatory recall powers for FDA, mandated inspections and testing on a regular basis for food producers, and major changes in what USDA considers acceptable pathogens in meat that's allowed in the foodchain.Senators visited included Susan Collins (R-ME), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Majority Leader Henry Reid (D-NV), Al Franken (D-Minn), Amy Klobuchar ( D-Minn), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Olympia Snow (R-ME), among others. More photos will be posted when these become available. Sen. Reid has pledged to try to get a food safety Bill passed during this Congress.
Attorney Marler represents many food poisoning victims and their families, including Stephanie Smith, who was profiled on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, after becoming devastatingly ill from eating a tainted hamburger that was produced by Cargill company (Ms. Smith is permanently paralyzed and suffered brain damage, among other health issues). On Monday, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack responded to the Times story, pledging better food safety...but food safety experts think he's not doing enough, fast enough. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn), a longtime champion of food safety, has fired off a letter to Secretary Vilsack, demanding an investigation into tainted beef, and calling for much greater accountability from larger slaughterhouses. In July, Rep. DeLauro was critical to getting the House to pass HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. She noted during the contentious debates over the Bill that when 3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11, America immediately went to war...and that 5,000 Americans die annually from food poisoning. There has been no official response from Secretary Vilsack...yet.
Related: An Ob Fo interview with Bill Marler is here. The Times story about tainted meat and Stephanie Smith is here (unfortunately, you have to sign in to open the link).
