Publisher’s Platform: Sen. Klobuchar wants food safety programs the Administration cut put back

— OPINION —

On July 14, Sen. Amy Klobuchar sent a letter to the acting heads of the CDC and FDA asking them to restore the food safety programs the Trump Administration cut and start tracking foodborne illness again. She named them — FoodNet, the Food Emergency Response Network, the Food Safety Inspection Service, the Public Health Infrastructure Grants, and the Preventive Services Block Grants. I’ve spent thirty years representing the people those programs protect, and I’ll say it plainly: she’s right, and everyone who eats should be behind her.

Here’s what she’s pointing at. Last year the administration cut FoodNet’s tracking from ten foodborne pathogens down to two — and Cyclospora, the parasite now tearing through the country, was one of the eight it dropped. Reporting it became optional. The FDA’s Food Emergency Response Network was suspended after its scientists were let go, and the grants that pay for state lab capacity and disease tracking were terminated. Her letter lands the consequence in one sentence: there is no longer a central place to report and compare this data across state lines. 

A word about the numbers, because they make her case stronger than her letter does. She cites nearly 2,800 cases and 86 hospitalizations in the cyclospora outbreak as of July 9. Those figures are already old and low. As I write this, the CDC has 1,645 confirmed cases and admits it is aware of more than 5,100 more under investigation — nearly 7,000 people. Michigan alone has counted 3,762. Add up just the eleven states that still publish their own tallies, and you are past 4,900.

That is the whole argument. The Senator could only cite “nearly 2,800” because the system meant to count the rest was defunded. The distance between her number and the real one isn’t a weakness in her letter — it is the proof of it. When you stop tracking a pathogen, you don’t make a single sick person well. You just lose the ability to see them. The people are still out there — children and grandparents living through weeks of dehydrating illness from a bag of salad greens — now invisible to the one agency we count on to sound the alarm.

I’ve watched this before. I started after the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in 1993, and the biggest improvement since has been our ability to catch outbreaks early, link cases across state lines, and pull tainted food before it kills someone. Every one of those abilities runs on the programs in Klobuchar’s letter. Strip them out and we are worse off than in 1993: the food supply is bigger and more national than ever, and a single lot of contaminated greens can reach dozens of states before anyone connects the first two cases.

So yes — I support her request without a caveat. Restore FoodNet, the Food Emergency Response Network, the Food Safety Inspection Service, the Public Health Infrastructure Grants, and the Preventive Services Block Grants. Put Cyclospora back on the list of things this country bothers to count. And do it now, while the outbreak is still growing — because the alternative is what we are living: an agency reporting 1,645, a reality closer to 7,000, and a widening gap where real people get sick and no one in Washington is required to notice.

Senator Klobuchar is asking the right question. The rest of us should make sure it does not go unanswered.