The Food and Drug Administration was facing an existential crisis.
Its oldest and most important function — ensuring safe conditions within the food supply — was impossible to continue maintaining.
The task was simply too much to humanly handle anymore and, as a result, an estimated 48 million Americans were getting sick, 128,000 were being hospitalized, and 3,000 died per year.
The total cost of all this suffering is lowballed at $55 billion per year. And it is impossible to measure the full extent of missed work days, lost wages, and trips to the doctor.
Citizens, businesses, and politicians all demanded drastic changes. And so the Food Modernization and Safety Act of 2011 was signed by Obama.
Even with the sweeping changes in regulations across the government, the Trump administration is maintaining the core rules it set.
But the numbers — of dollars, employees, inspections, etc. — could never equal the task. The FMSA looked like another good idea on paper that would be a terrible solution in reality.
As such, until just this year, the FDA was between a rock and a hard place — Between a virtually impossible-to-fulfill mandate and a budget that couldn’t cover the cost unless it grew many times over.
But something big has changed for the FDA, and the news about it is about to break wide open.
Thanks to a small biotech company riding in like a knight in shining armor, the FDA has finally found a way to do what we trust it to do again.
No Place For People
Over the last several generations, food costs have fallen in real terms and as a percentage of household budgets. Meanwhile, operating costs have continued to climb and the population has grown even faster.
Now none but the most efficient, massive operations can eke out a profit.
Modern slaughterhouses move 400 cows through their lines per hour. There can be as little as 35 seconds to gut and split them. For chickens, that rate climbs as high as 200 per minute.
A minimum of one chicken per 22,000 a week is tested for E. Coli and inspectors only test a minimum of one of 300 beef carcasses per week.
Fruits, vegetables, and nuts go through similarly massive processing and packing plants, and are actually the leading sources of food poisoning.
In this environment, the FMSA added rules the FDA couldn’t possibly meet.
It demanded three times more frequent inspections, records for all testing results, and inspection of foreign food supplies among them.
This is all in an effort to get the FDA to meet its newest mandate — preventing outbreaks from ever happening.
The numbers — of dollars, employees, inspections, etc. — can never equal the task with how the FDA has operated in the past.
The food industry is practically where others were a hundred years ago. Human inspectors can never get it right; they are far too slow, and they are insanely expensive.
What the FDA needed to do was find a way to remove as much of the human component to testing as possible.
To The Rescue
It just so happens that the military had been funding work on exactly the kind of machine that could provide the speed, precision, and low cost the FDA needed to comply with the new law and move food inspections into the 21st century.
The new tech comes from a scientist who did similar work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, better known for top secret conventional and nuclear weapons research, which became the basis for the Department of Homeland Security’s BioWatch program.
The airborne detector, designed to rapidly detect airborne pathogens and bioweapons, is ideally suited for the job.
It’s accurate, simple to use, and takes less than an hour to get results. In short, it is exactly what the FDA needed to have any chance of meeting its new mandate.
And most importantly, a single person with just a couple hours of training can process up to 36 tests per sample in a matter of minutes, instead of the weeks it took trained scientists to get the same results in the past.
Nick Hodge introduced this company in an in-depth research report to his Early Advantage readers already. I suggest you check out his report as soon as possible.
This new tech is being rolled out on Fox News tomorrow, and any chance to get in before the rest of the herd will be gone.
