This probably doesn’t some as a surprise as in the aftermath, would anyone buy their products again? When it comes to lawsuits on the issue, King Nut Co. and Kellogg Co. are also involved as they used their products.
The FDA has even created a widget to post listing all the products. (See below) You can also share and use the widget as well. At first the issues seemed to be overseas with food products and drugs, and now we are having our own problems. Sad that people had to die over the poisoning too. The sooner the FDA can get a bank of servers taking in quality control numbers and stats from manufacturing plants, the better assurance we may have on the content of the food we eat The peanut company had even changed labs as one had been to tough on the numbers I read in another article, so again, perhaps adding some technology here with an automated reporting system, both here and otherwise would help, and it would also serve to help FDA enforcement agents as well to be triggered to a factory with issues immediately. BD
One of my ideas from a prior post:
FDA to detain food shipments from China – Why not add some technology to the inspection processes?
I don’t think in view of the current events, there was a lot of choice here for the FDA, and we do need to know that the quality of both our food and pharmaceutical products is good.
One thing in particular that springs to mind for me here here is perhaps some use of business intelligence for monitoring. This is not a cure all for the entire process, but technology can aid and offer some nice assistance here. A reporting function would need to be set up to automatically report back to a central agency on criteria established for each drug or food product. At the receiving end, anything out of tolerance would be immediately sent to an alert. Now granted, this should be done locally from every plant, but when you can’t physically have agents in place at every factory all the time, this could offer some real relief and help.
With today’s speed of data transmissions, a server farm could be set up to monitor this type of activity and before an over seas factory began to export to the US, this would be a prerequisite to be established. Each lot before packaged would send the chemical content back to the central gathering agency and report in, with both the US agency and the local factory itself having the information at hand.
Again, this comes back to adding some new software and algorithms to the process, but computers could provide this information in a couple of seconds. Audit trails would also be there to allow for checking back on submissions. A bank of sophisticated server farms could do the work. This would also tend to build product credibility as well if everyone knows up front that the chemical content was being reported before the end packaging occurs. Again, not to replace an actual physical inspection all together, but, it would also stand to make those inspections much more information rich and valuable and create safe consumable products.
We do so much today by remote transmissions with information reporting, why not put in in place and use it where it is vital. This could also be done globally too, with each country receiving reports on products they import from other countries. It would sure beat some of the guesswork we see out there today, not to mention illnesses and death from products that are tainted or contaminated. With the global economy changing every day, it makes sense to know what we are getting and it is impossible to physically monitor all the systems without using some modern day technology.
A secondary thought here too is to ensure that all products carry a label showing the city, country, etc. of where the product was manufactured so we don’t incur the long time delays in figuring out which lot went where, no more blind shipping documents as they exist today. Wonder why this process has not been considered yet? BD
FDA Product Recall ListATLANTA (AP) — The peanut processing company at the heart of a national salmonella outbreak is going out of business. The Lynchburg, Va.-based Peanut Corp. of America filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Virginia Friday, the latest bad news for the company that has been accused of producing tainted peanut products that may have reached everyone from poor school children to disaster victims.
The Associated Press: Peanut Corp. of America files for bankruptcy
Related Reading:
0 comments :
Post a Comment