Egg recall hatches more regulations: more FDA regulations don't always mean greater food safety.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Columns - Column

"YOU NEVER WANT a serious crisis to go to waste," former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously declared. The head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Margaret Hamburg, is paying heed to Emanuel's maxim, using the recall of a half billion eggs to argue that her agency should have more power over food. Over the summer, the agency traced an uptick in salmonella infections to eggs. In the wake of the resulting recall, Hamburg urged the U.S. Senate to pass the Food Safety Enhancement Act, which the House of Representatives approved in the summer of 2009.

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Is the egg recall a "serious crisis"? The unfortunate citizens immiserated by diarrhea and nausea from eating contaminated eggs will think so. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's foodborne illness surveillance system finds that from 1998 to 2009 rates of infection have declined for shigella, yersinia, STEC 0157, campylobacter, listeria, and, yes, salmonella. The only notable foodborne disease that saw its rates go up was vibrio. That does not sound like a situation that demands sweeping new legislation.

So why all the hullabaloo about food safety at a time when our food is less likely than ever to make us sick? Researchers at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University searched the Google news archive and found that, at the same time that the decline in foodborne illnesses was taking place, the number of media reports on food safety grew from about 22,000 in 1998 to over 60,000 last year. It's not at all surprising that this increase in coverage, spotlighting tainted spinach, tomatoes, peanuts, and deli meats, has fueled consumer anxiety over food safety.

OK: So foodborne illness seems to be decreasing. But maybe further regulation would speed up that decline and better protect public health, right? There are reasons to doubt it.

First let's review what the new law would do. The Food Safety Enhancement Act would dramatically increase the FDA'S role in regulating food production in the United States. The legislation would require some 378,000 facilities to pay an annual $500 fee to register with the FDA, to keep voluminous records about their safety systems, and to be subject to FDA-approved inspections every year or two.

In addition, the act authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to establish an elaborate tracing system. The aim is to let the agency identify each person who grows, produces, manufactures, processes...