Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
The United States is making the first major changes
in its food safety rules since the nineteen
thirties. A new law called the Food Safety
Modernization Act will govern all foods except meat,
poultry and some egg products. It calls for
increased government inspections of food processors.
And it lets the Food and Drug Administration order
the recall of unsafe foods. That agency has only
been able to negotiate with manufacturers to remove
products from the market. The new law also increases
requirements for imported foods. But the law
excludes small farmers and processors from the same
rules as large producers. And it does not require
sellers at farmers markets and food stands to meet
the highest requirements. That pleases Susan Prolman,
director of the National Sustainable Agriculture
Coalition.She said a "one-size-fits-all" approach
would have put small farmers and ranchers out of
business. Or it would have prevented them from
providing locally produced, healthy, fresh food to
consumers. The Consumer Federation of America says
it is generally pleased with the new law. So is much
of the food industry. But Republican Representative
Jack Kingston of Georgia questioned whether enough
people get sick from food to justify the spending.
The legislation could cost the government almost one
and a half billion dollars over five years. In
December, federal officials lowered their estimates
of how many Americans each year get sick from food.
The new estimates are forty-eight million, or one in
six people. One hundred twenty-eight thousand are
hospitalized. And three thousand die. The old
estimates included seventy-six million illnesses and
five thousand deaths. Experts at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention made their last
estimates in nineteen ninety-nine. Officials say the
difference is largely the result of improvements in
data and research methods. They say the two
estimates cannot be compared to measure trends. Yet
one thing has not changed. About eighty percent of
illnesses spread by food are still listed as having
been caused by "unspecified agents." In other words,
no one really knows which bacteria, viruses or other
organisms were responsible. But in cases with a
known cause the experts say salmonella is
responsible for more than one-third of
hospitalizations. And it causes more than one-fourth
of deaths. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex
Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
