American consumers are vulnerable to contaminated products

Somehow I did not catch this report immediately after its publication. In the news links on the right side of this blog, there’s a report showing how vulnerable the American consumers are to the contaminated products. It’s shocking to know that FDA inspects less than one percent of imports a year. Less than one percent...

Former Director of Imports for FDA (1999-2005), Carl Nielsen, said "... There's so little known from the foreign markets." I totally agree. Especially food and/ingredients that are from countries that have little or no free media reporting. The melamine contaminated milk products from China is a very clear example. My understanding was that, in China there were complaints of melamine contamination in the Chinese milk since last December. But, with the Chinese style of media, no news outlets knew about, or reported it until huge numbers of Chinese kids got sick and were sent to hospitals.

Without sufficient FDA inspections, the American consumers are eating the food coming from the same "black box food supplies" as that of the third world countries.

Before FDA got enough funding and manpower to do sufficient inspection on the imports, we would like at least to see some transparency by food makers - labeling country origin for the ingredients.