Food Safety: Actions Needed by USDA and FDA to Ensure That Companies Promptly Carry Out Recalls

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on voluntary food recall programs, focusing on: (1) the number of food recalls documented by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 1984, and of those, the number associated with outbreaks of foodborne illnesses; (2) for recalls associated with such outbreaks, the extent to which USDA and FDA identified the cause of the outbreak and how the product became contaminated; (3) the extent to which companies delayed or did not comply with USDA- or FDA-requested recalls; and (4) the economic impact of recalls on affected companies, to the extent identifiable.