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Food Irradiation and the FDA's Junk Science

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Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program, based in Washington D.C., has launched a national effort to oppose food irradiation. In October, 2000 they released a report that sharply drew into focus the junk science behind the Food and Drug Administration's approval of irradiation of meat to spices to eggs. The executive summary of the report, "A Broken Record: How the FDA Legalized - and Continues to Legalize Food Irradiation Without Testing It for Safety" is printed, with permission, below. The full text of the report can be viewed or down loaded at http://www.citizen.org/cmep or it can be obtained by writing to Public Citizen, 215 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003. The report was copublished with The Cancer Prevention Coalition and Global Resource Action Center for the Environment. The authors are Mark Worth and Wenonah Hauter of Public Citizen and Samuel Epstein, M.D., Chair of The Cancer Prevention Coalition and Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, School of Public Health, University of Illinois Medical Center-Chicago. Public Citizen has organizational partners across the country. The Minnesota Safe Food Link coalition is one of those partners. "Meat irradiation is a prop for factory feedlot and large industrial style meat processing factories," according to Don Pylkannen, Executive Director of Minnesota COACT and coordinator for the Minnesota Safe Food Link coalition.

A Broken Record Executive Summary This past May-almost 45 years to the day after a U.S. Army general proudly showed members of Congress a picture of a beef tenderloin that had undergone "radiation sterilization"-irradiated meat went on public sale in the United States. Today, somewhere in Iowa or Florida or North Dakota, someone is biting into a hamburger that has been irradiated with the equivalent of 150 million chest x-rays-and maybe sprinkling it with spices that have been "treated" with the equivalent of 1 billion chest x-rays. Has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration done its job to ensure that this food - food that has been exposed to deadly radioactive material or electrons fired nearly to the speed of light - is safe for human consumption? Unfortunately, for the American consumer, the answer is 'No.' In the most in-depth investigation ever conducted into the FDA's oversight of food irradiation, these disturbing facts have come to light:

* Since 1983, FDA agency officials have knowingly and systematically ignored federal regulations and their own testing protocols that must be followed before irradiated food can legally be approved for human consumption.

* Since 1986, FDA officials have legalized irradiation for several major classes of food while relying on nearly 80 scientific studies that the agency's own expert scientists had dismissed as "deficient." (The FDA legalized the irradiation of eggs in July 2000, for instance, based on three "deficient" studies, one of which was conducted in 1959.)

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