Months after Texas-based ice cream makers Blue Bell gave the country a major scare after listeria was found in a number of their products, the Food and Health Administration is taking the biggest step in the past century regarding protection against foodborne diseases, through new FDA food safety rules.
Four and a half years ago, the Food Safety Modernization Act (or FSMA) became a law, and it's now that the government agency that regulates this releases its first two major rules regarding the topic, as the new FDA safety rules have officially been submitted to the Federal Register.
According to a press release on the agency's website, the new FDA food safety regulations come at a time when approximately 48 million people get sick every year from diseases stemming from food, with 128,000 being hospitalized leading to 3,000 foodborne disease-related illnesses.
The two recently released FDA food safety rules are preventive control ones, and their focus is on implemented them to the manufacturing processes of foods made for humans as well as animals (either pets or livestock), making sure that companies work towards preventing consumers from becoming ill.
Food Safety News reports that the new rules are in charge of modernizing current good manufacturing practices (CGMPs), which take care of every step of processing until food reaches helves, and these were last updated in 1986.
According to The Wall Street Journal, these new FDA food safety rules stem from the 2010 passed laws in Congress that saw the biggest overhaul in foodborne prevention in the pas 70 years, so this is set to be innovative in the health of Americans, applicable to national food companies as well as those made outside the U.S. and selling their products to American consumers.
In total, there will be seven FDA food safety rules in this pack, and the rest will be finalized by 2016.
