Before the FDA takes on the regulation of cigarettes, the agency has much work to do to improve the safety of America's food, according to a recent editorial co-authored by new FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, M.D. and Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, M.D. in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The new guard at the FDA cut to the chase, pointing to the recent salmonella outbreak via tainted peanut butter as "far more than a sanitation problem at one troubled facility. It reflected a failure of the FDA and its regulatory partners to identify risk and to establish and enforce basic preventive controls. And it exposed the failure of scores of food manufacturers to adequately monitor the safety of ingredients purchased from this facility."

Much of this negative attention was deserved, the duo says, thanks to controversies connected to the alleged safety of multiple products -- including many drugs -- regulated by the FDA that were further questioned by the public, Congress and the media.

The "cure" to food safety issues, according to the editorial, starts with using the data at hand to identify "the riskiest parts of an enormous and complex system," and partnering with the Department of Agriculture among other state and federal entities to create a modernized system "focused on the prevention of contamination."

New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 360, No. 24, p. 2493-2495, June 11, 2009 Free Full Text Article

MSNBC.com May 26, 2009

Nutra Ingredients-USA.com May 27, 2009