Briefs

Dec 2, 2008 (CIDRAP News) - The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a report yesterday detailing the first year of accomplishments in implementing its Food Protection Plan, a road map the agency presented in November 2007 in response to a spate of contamination incidents involving domestic and imported food.

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According to the report, the FDA has formed a steering committee to transition a data mining technology tool for screening imported food - the Predictive Risk-based Evaluation for Dynamic Import Compliance Targeting (PREDICT) system - from the pilot phase to agency-wide use.

To boost laboratory capacity, the FDA reported it is using a high-throughput facility in Denver to test food and enhance data quality and has awarded cooperative agreements to all Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) laboratories to upgrade facilities, conduct training on new testing methods, or increase sample analysis capacity.

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