1. Supposedly (if you believe the FDA) the test was a false positive, so we don't actually know where the contaminated produce originated.
2. Food packaged in other countries for sale in the US still has to meet the same food safety standards as food packaged in the US, and facilities can be inspected by the FDA or USDA. Imported foods are further randomly tested at the port of entry. What has changed recently is that major cuts to those agencies have resulted in significant reductions in staff and/or funding available for inspections.
U.S. audits of foreign country inspection systems for equivalency with America’s food safety regulations, such as the Federal Meat Inspection Act, the
www.foodsafetynews.com
They've also stressed that a false positive doesn't clear Taylor Farms, and all signs still point to them
Your reporting has frequently mentioned Taylor Farms. Has cyclospora been traced back to any produce not produced by that company?
Caroline Hopkins Legaspi: As of now, no. But we can’t interpret that to mean that other products are in the clear. Traceback investigations are very difficult and time consuming, and we may be looking at a number of disparate cyclospora outbreaks with different sources. There’s strong epidemiological evidence linking the Midwest-centered outbreak to iceberg lettuce that Taylor Farms sourced from central Mexico.
As far as #2, while on paper they have to meet the same standards, actual enforcement and inspection frequency/protocol differ greatly.
Couple of obvious challenges and caveats.
Obviously the logistics, it's easier to get to domestic facilities distance wise.
The other is the random/unannounced nature of the domestic inspections (that can happen at anytime without warning) keeps companies on their toes so to speak.
The same can't happen for international inspections unless you're working with a very friendly cooperative (non-corrupt) government.
We can't send inspectors secretly into a foreign land (in their official capacity) without entities from the other country getting notified.
In the US a domestic facilities could have the "suits" show up without warning at 3pm today for a surprise inspection that they didn't know was coming, so their stuff better be in order. Non-domestically, that's not possible for all countries.
We can likely work something out with a nation like Canada to let their government now "Hey, we've got some FDA fellas heading in to inspect that food canning facility to make sure everything's up to snuff... don't let them know we're coming", and they'd likely comply - or we could just flat out trust their own internal inspector reports which are probably even stricter than ours and rubber stamp it.
That's not going to be true of a country like Mexico. Too much money changing hands and too much corruption at multiple levels of government down there, the idea that we'd be able to show up for a surprise inspection without someone down there finding out about it well in advance in order to "tidy up before the guests arrive" isn't going to be realistic in a lot of cases.
The proportion of US food that is imported is increasing; most seafood and half of fruits are imported. We identified a small but increasing number of foodborne disease outbreaks associated with imported foods, most commonly fish and produce. New ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Mexico is disproportionately represented in terms of their footprint regarding imported food outbreak situations.
Information was available on the region of origin for 177 (91%) outbreaks. Latin America and the Caribbean was the most common region implicated, followed by Asia (Technical Appendix). Thirty-one countries were implicated; Mexico was most frequently implicated (42 outbreaks). Other countries associated with >10 outbreaks were Indonesia (n = 17) and Canada (n = 11).
