[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 17904-17905]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              FOOD SAFETY

  Mr. REID. Madam President, we are going to continue debate, as I 
announced, on the food safety legislation. No one in America should 
have to worry if their salad or sandwich is going to kill them. No one 
in the Senate should prey on that fear or play with it like a political 
football. Yet that is exactly what is happening.
  If you follow the Senate every day, you might not be surprised to see 
our Republican friends turn food safety into a partisan political 
issue. But if you are trying to keep yourself and your family healthy, 
you may be appalled, and rightfully so.
  You might also be troubled to learn that our food safety system has 
not been updated in almost 100 years, in almost a century. Food 
processing, production, and marketing have surely advanced over the 
last hundred years, but our safety measures have not. New contaminants 
come up every day, but our safety measures do not keep up.
  That is because our FDA does not have the authority or research it 
needs to keep up. This bill will fix that. It will greatly improve this 
important system, and it will keep regulatory burdens on farmers and 
food producers to a minimum. It simply gives the FDA the authority to 
recall contaminated foods to find out where these dangerous foods come 
from and to stop them from getting into our grocery stores.
  It is a bipartisan bill. The HELP Committee passed it unanimously. 
But somewhere between the committee and the Senate floor, making sure 
the food we eat is not poisonous has somehow become a partisan issue. 
That should be unacceptable to everyone.
  Food poisoning kills as many as 5,000 of us, we Americans, every 
year. Foodborne illnesses sicken one in four people every year. I do 
not how many people have been affected by food poisoning. The Presiding 
Officer is from New York. My wife and I went to New York a number of 
years ago with our son and his girlfriend. We were going to go to a 
play. We had dinner at a nice restaurant. We both had chicken, the same 
dish. About 4 o'clock in the morning, I asked my wife if she would get 
me a drink of water. She said: No, I cannot; I am too sick. I was too 
sick too. We were so sick that day. We got out of the room we were 
staying in sometime midmorning. And, frankly, my wife never, ever got 
over that completely. She had an illness to begin with called 
ulcerative colitis. This exacerbated her symptoms so badly that 
ultimately she was hospitalized for more than a month.
  These illnesses affect everyone. Contaminated food affects people and 
affects people very badly. I repeat, 5,000

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of us die every year as a result of foodborne illnesses. The 
specialists say it is probably more than that, because a lot of times 
when people die they do not know it is from food poisoning.
  One of four of us every year gets sick. If 25 Senators, one-quarter 
of this Senate, got food poisoning this year, we would do something 
about it, and we would not think twice about which political party 
those Senators who got sick were from. People often think of food 
poisoning as an upset stomach that goes away in a few hours or a day. 
Sometimes, yes, that is all it is. But sometimes it is much worse. I 
have met with the families who have been seriously sickened by the food 
they have eaten, people who are hospitalized for weeks and months and 
months, who came close to death.
  In some cases they will deal with the results of their food poisoning 
for the rest of their lives. One such person is a little girl named 
Rylee Gustafson. She is from Henderson, NV. When she was 9 years old, 
she ate a salad that almost killed her. It had spinach in it. That 
spinach had E. coli. Rylee got so seriously ill that she, of course, 
was hospitalized, and for a long time. Three others who got E. coli 
from fresh spinach died. This little girl is a feisty little thing. But 
her growth has been stunted. She will never be the size she should be.
  There are lots of stories, none of them pleasant. But a woman named 
Linda Rivera from Las Vegas ate some cookie dough. E. coli was in the 
cookie dough. She was in a coma for a long time. She is recovering but 
not really well.
  Then a few days ago, the CDC alerted us to another E. coli outbreak. 
This was cheese. And 37 Americans so far had gotten sick from a brand 
of cheese sold in the western part of the United States, including two 
people in Nevada.
  So why have we waited this long to make our food safer? We are still 
playing these games, political games. The answer is nothing more than 
very base politics. It is shameful. I hope we can end that today. The 
vast majority of the Senate wants to pass this bill. And we should not 
have just a few people standing in the way of doing something that will 
help the health and safety of our country.

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