Food and Product Safety Enforcement

Floor Speech

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. President, products that are labeled ``Made in China'' can be found in our cars, in our closets, and in our cupboards. So too are the ingredients in the foods we eat often, the medicine we take, the candy our children enjoy, and the toys they play with. But how many times have we heard in the last few years of illness and death from contaminated foods or drugs or toys that were made in China? In Toledo, OH, patients died after taking contaminated Heparin to treat their heart conditions.

Drug manufacturers have acknowledged that they turn to countries such as China to buy ingredients to put into pharmaceuticals. U.S. companies often move production to China, buy ingredients there, put these drugs together, and sell them back into the United States with ingredients that may not pass some of the safety inspections they should. One company acknowledged that 17 percent of its active ingredients in manufacturing are outsourced, often to countries with weaker drug safety standards.

When high lead levels were discovered in toys several years ago, I urged stronger oversight to help keep our children safe. Four years ago, I asked Dr. Jeffrey Weidenhamer of Ashland University in north central Ohio to test lead levels. He had already begun testing with the students, and we asked him to do it again, to test the lead level in Halloween toys, including the cups and the buckets that Ohio children would be eating out of and decorations families would be using that children often put into their mouths during the holidays. He tested products in the fall of 2007 for Halloween and the spring of 2008 for Easter toys. He identified 12 of 97 products contaminated with high quantities--much higher than what is considered safe by our government--high lead contents in this lead-based paint on our toys; among them, candy buckets, drinking cups, fake teeth, and other Halloween props. At Easter, it was eggs and baskets and other things. It included products bought at leading national retailers.

At the same time, it was clear that our trading system, patterned in many ways and with businesses following this business plan of shutting down production in places such as Rhode Island, which the Presiding Officer represents, and Ohio, shutting down production in our country and moving it to China, manufacturing products there, and selling products back here, that trade system has failed basic consumer and public safety standards.

There is nothing free about trade that puts children in the hospital for playing with a toy or eating candy or brushing their teeth. That is why Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. The act sent a simple message to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is charged with protecting consumers: Protect American children, protect families, protect companies from unsafe and possibly fatal products.

That job has gotten a lot harder to protect the American public on food products, on toys, on pharmaceuticals, and on pet food, which I will discuss, because the business plan for so many companies has been to shut down production in Canton, OH, and move it to Guangzhou, China, shut down production in Toledo or Dayton, OH, and move it to Wuhan or Shiyan, China, in order to save money, in order to cut worker safety costs, in order to evade environmental and consumer regulations sometimes.

The new law that we passed meant that hundreds of thousands of toys and food and other imports from China and elsewhere can be recalled when they are unsafe. The key is inspection of these products, and the key is making the companies liable that outsource the jobs to China in order to save money. We don't want more court cases and more litigation, but if these companies are going to move production to China, they need to take responsibility for the toys if the toys have been painted with lead-based paint. They need to take responsibility for the pharmaceutical ingredients--sometimes dangerous ingredients that somebody has somehow put in these pharmaceuticals when production comes from China. They need to be careful about food safety. They need to be careful about treats for pets that have been contaminated.

That act has been a success. Last year, Dr. Weidenhamer conducted another test and found no lead-based paint contamination in Halloween items.

But there is a gap in our trade system that threatens public health and public safety. We passed a law to close that gap. Public safety has benefited, and companies are still able to make and sell their products in this free market.

One year ago, Congress passed and the President signed into law the bipartisan Food Safety Modernization Act. The law provides the FDA with the tools needed to better protect our food supply, to recall tainted or adulterated food, and to respond more effectively to foodborne illness outbreaks. It empowered the FDA with new authority to establish a traceability system; that is, when a product comes to your table, whether it is food in this case, a pharmaceutical, or whether it is a toy, the company that sells that product needs to be able to trace back all the ingredients, all the components, where they came from, how they were produced, and under what conditions they were produced. It is that type of public safety infrastructure that is so important.

Yet, as we have seen with food and toys and drugs imported from China, now we are seeing it with pet food. Yesterday I met with Kevin Thaxton of Cuyahoga County--the Cleveland area--whose wife Candance wrote to me after one of their dogs, a 9-year-old pug, died from kidney failure. They thought it was the pug simply getting older. I had a pug once, and they don't usually live much beyond 10 years. Then, as they got another dog that got sick immediately, they figured out it was likely from eating Chinese-made chicken jerky treats. Until the second dog, they didn't make the connection between the pet food and the pet illness, when the second dog, the puppy, had a life-threatening illness.

Another Ohioan, Terry Safranek, joined us at our meeting 2 days ago. Terry lost her 9-year-old fox terrier earlier this year. She did not realize that tainted chicken jerky treats could be responsible for her dog's death until she saw the Thaxton's story on the evening news.

These two families, the Thaxtons and the Safraneks, and the 62 percent of U.S. households who own a pet shouldn't have to worry about the safety of the food they give their pets. It is an example again of a trade issue transforming
into a safety issue.

To explain this, so many companies in the United States as part of their business plan decide--in order to save money, in order to evade consumer protection laws, food safety laws, worker safety laws, and environmental laws, or for whatever reason--to move their production to China, with significantly cheaper labor. They shut down in Columbus or Cincinnati, OH, and they move to China to manufacture these products they sell back into the United States.

Probably unprecedented in economic or world history is where companies shut down one place, move overseas, produce the same item, and then sell them back into the home market. We know that with that whole trade regimen, that whole construct of that business plan of shutting down production and moving overseas and selling back in, there are significant health and safety problems. Again, there are problems with lead-based paint and there are problems with the safety of other consumer items. There are problems with food safety, there are problems with pharmaceutical ingredients contamination, and now there are problems with pet foods.

The Food and Drug Administration has logged more than 350 reports of pet illnesses thought to be connected to chicken jerky treats made in China. Although the FDA has already issued a warning about illness, they have not yet for sure identified a contaminant. The treats remain on market shelves in stores across the country.

I would never on this Senate floor suggest people buy something or boycott something else. I would suggest, though, that people look at the product when they buy something for their pet and that they look at where it is made and make the judgment based on that.

I am calling on the FDA to accelerate its investigation of imported pet food, especially food imported from China, where the possibility of food contamination is higher. That is the FDA's job.

Earlier this week, I sent a letter to Dr. Hamburg, the FDA Commissioner, urging her agency to act swiftly to make sure that products found to be harmful are pulled from retail outlets. I have asked the FDA to improve its notification system so pet owners know about items under investigation for pet food safety breaches. The FDA should promptly pursue efforts to find the contaminant in these pet treats and ensure they are pulled from store shelves to prevent any unnecessary pet deaths.

Contaminated toys, hard-to-trace medical ingredients, and now pet food have all forced Americans to turn to the government to ensure the safety of the products we import. It is a problem with trade law that we have set this up to happen far too often.

It is an example of when government works when we stepped in on lead-based paint, kept those products off the market, and made sure that products coming in now are safer because we passed the consumer protection revision. It shows that government stepping in, in the right way, can make a difference in saving the lives of children, protecting people's pets, protecting pharmaceuticals--making sure that pharmaceutical safety is guaranteed as much as possible.

We have been down this road before. There is nothing free about trade that
undermines basic health rules. There is nothing free about trade that weakens safety rules, the very rules that help keep food safe to eat and water and air safe to drink and to breathe. The FDA should take action now to protect American pet owners from tainted products that can harm the health of their pets.
It has been a longtime victory for the American people that the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we take, the toys we buy for our children, the treats we buy for our pets--we have done a good job in this country in the last several decades of the government partnering with businesses to make sure these products are generally safe for our families--for ourselves, for our children, and for our pets. Now, these holes in our trade laws--these trade laws that encourage companies to go overseas and produce products and sell them back here--clearly have undermined so much of what we have accomplished bipartisanly for so many years for the health and safety of the American public.

Thus the role of government can be important to show that we do know how to do this to protect our families. I urge the FDA to step in here on this issue and help American families.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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