Food and Drug Administration Not Inspecting Food

With all the hoopla over the partial shut down of the Federal Government, one story that has gone under reported is that the Food and Drug Administration is one of the many federal agencies whose furloughed employees are off the clock.  So all the imported seafood and domestic produce on the shelves in the coming weeks will have gone through no inspection process to be deemed safe.  According to Gizmodo:

FDA food safety inspectors are furloughed right now and have been all week. Which, as Quartz explains, is problematic because, in addition to finding the source of outbreaks, the FDA also monitors 80 percent of all U.S. food and especially imports. And don't think for a second that the food safety inspectors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren't on Furlough too, because they are.

Fruits, vegetables, seafood and and basically anything else that comes through US customs isn't being safety checked by the FDA right now.

The first thing that occurred to me while reading this article though was a statistic I had run across recently.  One that apparently MSNBC was reporting on back in 2009:

Meanwhile, the FDA is so understaffed, it’s only able to inspect roughly 1 percent of foods that are imported into the country. And the rate of inspections at U.S. plants isn't much better. The FDA had not inspected Peanut Corporation of America’s Georgia plant since 2001. Investigators say PCA’s own internal tests repeatedly found salmonella traces, but it continued to sell peanut butter products.

So make of this latest development in the ever expanding series of unfortunate consequences resulting from the Federal Governments 18% shut down.  However with 99% of food getting through the system while bypassing inspection to begin with I'm not too worried about that last 1% getting a pass for a week.