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FDA awards millions for food and feed safety

02-10-2008 | |
FDA awards millions for food and feed safety

The FDA awarded 17 grants worth millions of dollars to enhance food and feed safety.

The US Food and Drug Administration yesterday announced the awarding of 17 grants to enhance food and feed safety. These grants fund major cooperative agreements in four major areas. The FDA awarded a combined $5.2 million in these one-year grants to various state and local regulatory agencies.

“These cooperative agreements support and enhance local food protection efforts consistent with our Food Protection Plan,” said Michael Chappell, the FDA’s acting associate commissioner for regulatory affairs. “The grants represent an important step in the FDA¹s continued efforts to integrate and improve the effectiveness of food safety systems at the federal, state and local levels.”

Prevention: Ruminant Feed Ban Support Program. The cooperative agreements for the Ruminant Feed Ban Support Program further enhance the infrastructure of state, territorial, and tribal animal feed safety and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) prevention programs. Under these cooperative agreements, state, territory, and tribal governments will enhance their feed/BSE safety programs to increase the ability to locate and visit companies involved in the manufacture, distribution, and transportation of animal feed as well as operations feeding ruminant animals, and to verify their compliance with the BSE/ruminant feed ban.

Funds may also be used to conduct educational outreach activities and to develop materials needed to further enhance the industries’ knowledge of and compliance with the BSE/ruminant feed ban. The awards were up to $250,000 and the states receiving them were Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina and Washington.

Intervention: Food Safety and Security Monitoring
The grants for Food Safety and Security Monitoring provide funding to Food Emergency Response Network chemistry laboratories, laboratories essential to intervention efforts. The grants may be used for facility upgrades, training in current food testing methodologies, and increased laboratory sample analysis capacity, among other activities. In the event of a large-scale chemical terrorism event affecting food or food products, the recipient may be required to perform selected chemical analyses of food samples collected by the FDA or provided by other government agencies through the FDA. The states receiving these grants were Colorado, California and Ohio and were given up to $350,000.

Intervention: Innovative Food Defense
The Innovative Food Defense grants will generate novel solutions and outreach to address gaps in, or provide enhancement to, food defense nationwide — for example, implementing the food defense programs in food establishments called the Assure, Look, Employees, Reports, and Threat or ALERT, and Employees Follow, Inspect, Recognize, Secure, and Tell or FIRST.

For further information on this, visit FDA, click here

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