Fda, Food | featured news

Perhaps, like me, you’ve wondered what percentage of retail meat has foodborne pathogens, and of those, which pathogens are antibiotic resistant. Well, you’re in luck. The Food and Drug Administration’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System puts out a yearly report looking at the rates of antibiotic resistance of foodborne pathogens in retail meat and poultry samples. A thorough examination, the Retail Meat Report is hefty chunk of research to wade through. Because of this, it’s not easy to make conclusions on the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in the meat case just by reading through the report’s 80-plus pages.

Consumer Reports is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to set standards for how much arsenic can be allowed in rice after finding the potential toxin in almost every rice product it tested. FDA is running its own tests and says it would be premature to set standards or to urge consumers to change their eating habits. Rice producers say there's no documented evidence of health harm from arsenic in rice grown in the United States.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Friday that it would not ban the use of bisphenol A, also known as BPA, in food packaging but said it would continue research on the health effects of the widely used chemical.

The Food and Drug Administration says it will limit the presence of one type of antibiotics in meat, saying they could increase human resistance to the drugs. The agency said Wednesday it will restrict the use of cephalosporin antibiotics, which are often given to cattle, swine, chickens and turkeys before slaughter. The drugs are used to treat pneumonia, skin infections and other diseases in humans.

In the wake of Japan's nuclear disaster, all milk, milk products, fresh vegetables and fruit from one of four prefectures closest to the quake-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will be prevented from entering the United States, a spokesperson for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.

Federal health officials, concerned about the growing problem of superbugs, took a tentative step toward banning a common agricultural use of penicillin and tetracycline.

The expanded recall of TYLENOL Arthritis pain reliever is fresh evidence of the need for Congress and the FDA to regulate wood pallets used to transport food and pharmaceuticals in the United States because of the dangers they pose to human health.

The agency is targeting foods bearing logos or language suggesting the product is more healthful than the ingredients justify.

The Food and Drug Administration announced plans Tuesday to clamp down on food labeling that it says may mislead consumers into thinking products are more nutritious than they are.

Lovers of oysters on the half shell may want to indulge now, while they can. A new Food and Drug Administration plan to cut deaths from one of the deadliest types of food poisoning means that soon, live U.S.-grown oysters will become much harder to find from May to October.

Change gives sweeping new authority to FDA to regulate way food is grown, harvested, processed.