U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief Margaret Hamburg predicts that her agency "very soon" will issue new regulations needed to enforce the Food Safety Modernization Act, a sweeping piece of legislation enacted to upgrade the security of the U.S. food supply after a deadly salmonella outbreak in 2009.
Hamburg says implementation has been slow because Congress hasn’t provided enough money to meet the law’s ambitious demands. The legislation imposes the biggest changes in food safety since the 1930s and calls for the FDA to create new science-based safety standards for fruits, vegetables, packaged foods and food imports. “Implementing that broadly expansive mandate with limited resources has been a challenge," Hamburg told a forum hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization.