Canada Food Inspection Agency list of contaminated products from the Peanut Corp. of America in Georgia, including pet food products. About a third of the way down the page is the list of products manufactured in America.
Even though federal health officials have begun a criminal investigation into whether the Peanut Corporation of America deliberately sold contaminated products, the government still needed the company’s permission last week before announcing a huge recall of its products. —NYTimes online
Link to NYTimes online article here.
The FDA needed the permission of the Peanut Corp. of America prior to announcing a peanut product recall because the product was contaminated with salmonella? WTF is with that? Even that backwater nation known as Canada published the list of contaminated products from Peanut Corp. of America before the FDA had “permission”.
Let’s see now…
Salmonella? Can’t be. No way. Let’s see what the Peanut Corp. of America says about it first before we actually do anything. Quote: “Peanut Corporation of America will update this page as facts dictate.”
Really? I think they mean that they’ll publish an update after they dictate to the FDA what will be said.
It would seem the eight-year long nightmare the world was having isn’t over yet. But then, nothing so involved would ever truly happen overnight — unless it too was a nightmare.
We had the toothpaste brouhaha up here too, and the consequent counterfeit packaging issues. A huge Maple Leaf Foods plant near Toronto became contaminated with listeria last year, resulting in death and illness. The contaminated pet food mess is still resonating across the country.
Maple Leaf has just settled claims, thanks to the forthrightness of their CEO during the mess.
None of us are immune.
On the one hand, the “needing permission” thing just doesn’t sound right at all and I wonder if NY Times got confused somewhere along the way. At the same time, as screwed up as some of our regulations are, it doesn’t really shock me.
To top it all off, being a base ingredient manufacturer, it’s that much harder to find out where it all went and what products that crap went into…
Last year (?) when we had issues with counterfeit toothpaste w/antifreeze in it, Colgate couldn’t do a recall because the toothpaste was counterfeit and technically not their product – they couldn’t recall a product that wasn’t actually theirs…