Madam President, we are going to continue debate, as I announced, on the food safety legislation. No one in America should have to worry if their salad or sandwich is going to kill them. No one in the Senate should prey on that fear or…
Madam President, we are going to continue debate, as I announced, on the food safety legislation. No one in America should have to worry if their salad or sandwich is going to kill them. No one in the Senate should prey on that fear or play with it like a political football. Yet that is exactly what is happening.
If you follow the Senate every day, you might not be surprised to see our Republican friends turn food safety into a partisan political issue. But if you are trying to keep yourself and your family healthy, you may be appalled, and rightfully so.
You might also be troubled to learn that our food safety system has not been updated in almost 100 years, in almost a century. Food processing, production, and marketing have surely advanced over the last hundred years, but
our safety measures have not. New contaminants come up every day, but our safety measures do not keep up.
That is because our FDA does not have the authority or research it needs to keep up. This bill will fix that. It will greatly improve this important system, and it will keep regulatory burdens on farmers and food producers to a minimum. It simply gives the FDA the authority to recall contaminated foods to find out where these dangerous foods come from and to stop them from getting into our grocery stores.
It is a bipartisan bill. The HELP Committee passed it unanimously. But somewhere between the committee and the Senate floor, making sure the food we eat is not poisonous has somehow become a partisan issue. That should be unacceptable to everyone.
Food poisoning kills as many as 5,000 of us, we Americans, every year. Foodborne illnesses sicken one in four people every year. I do not how many people have been affected by food poisoning. The Presiding Officer is from New York. My wife and I went to New York a number of years ago with our son and his girlfriend. We were going to go to a play. We had dinner at a nice restaurant. We both had chicken, the same dish. About 4 o'clock in the morning, I asked my wife if she would get me a drink of water. She said: No, I cannot; I am too sick. I was too sick too. We were so sick that day. We got out of the room we were staying in sometime midmorning. And, frankly, my wife never, ever got over that completely. She had an illness to begin with called ulcerative colitis. This exacerbated her symptoms so badly that ultimately she was hospitalized for more than a month.
These illnesses affect everyone. Contaminated food affects people and affects people very badly. I repeat, 5,000 of us die every year as a result of foodborne illnesses. The specialists say it is probably more than that, because a lot of times when people die they do not know it is from food poisoning.
One of four of us every year gets sick. If 25 Senators, one-quarter of this Senate, got food poisoning this year, we would do something about it, and we would not think twice about which political party those Senators who got sick were from. People often think of food poisoning as an upset stomach that goes away in a few hours or a day. Sometimes, yes, that is all it is. But sometimes it is much worse. I have met with the families who have been seriously sickened by the food they have eaten, people who are hospitalized for weeks and months and months, who came close to death.
In some cases they will deal with the results of their food poisoning for the rest of their lives. One such person is a little girl named Rylee Gustafson. She is from Henderson, NV. When she was 9 years old, she ate a salad that almost killed her. It had spinach in it. That spinach had E. coli. Rylee got so seriously ill that she, of course, was hospitalized, and for a long time. Three others who got E. coli from fresh spinach died. This little girl is a feisty little thing. But her growth has been stunted. She will never be the size she should be.
There are lots of stories, none of them pleasant. But a woman named Linda Rivera from Las Vegas ate some cookie dough. E. coli was in the cookie dough. She was in a coma for a long time. She is recovering but not really well.
Then a few days ago, the CDC alerted us to another E. coli outbreak. This was cheese. And 37 Americans so far had gotten sick from a brand of cheese sold in the western part of the United States, including two people in Nevada.
So why have we waited this long to make our food safer? We are still playing these games, political games. The answer is nothing more than very base politics. It is shameful. I hope we can end that today. The vast majority of the Senate wants to pass this bill. And we should not have just a few people standing in the way of doing something that will help the health and safety of our country.