FDA finally crawls into action

As Goldy notes in his own inimitable way, the FDA has crawled into action concering possible contamination of human food with the chemical melamine. From Sun-Sentinel.com:

The government will begin a sweeping search of the country's food supply for the industrial chemical linked to the pet food scare, federal health officials announced yesterday.

By the end of the week, inspectors will start testing for melamine in corn meal, rice bran and other protein products commonly used in bread, cereal and pasta eaten by humans.

The expanded investigation comes as testing found the chemical in animals close to the human food supply - hogs at farms in California, North Carolina and South Carolina. Chickens in Missouri might have eaten it too.

Food and Drug Administration officials emphasized that there is no evidence so far that melamine has entered the human food chain, but they said they were ramping up monitoring as a precaution.

This has been a dismal performance by the FDA. Frankly, I don't understand why we would even be allowing food imports from China to continue at this point. Other countries immediately banned US beef during the BSE scare a few years ago, and that certainly didn't involve the possible intentional contamination of food.

Well, I probably do understand why we won't stop Chinese food imports. They have us over a financial barrel, that's why.

Heckuva job, Georgie.