As widely expected, President Barack Obama appointed Dr. Peggy Hamburg as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this morning during his weekly address.
Obama also appointed Dr. Josh Sharfstein as principal deputy commissioner of the federal agency that regulates food and drug safety in the United States.
In addition, Obama created a Food Safety Working Group to be led by the secretaries of the Health and Human Services and Agriculture departments. The working group is supposed to coordinate the examination, upgrade and enforcement of federal food safety laws.
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He also announced measures to keep diseased cows from entering the nation’s food supply and to invest in the FDA so it can hire more food inspectors and modernize its food safety laboratories.
The announcement comes after the Georgia Peanut Commission told a Congressional subcommittee this week that massive peanut butter recalls prompted by salmonella contamination at Peanut Corp. of America could cost the nation’s peanut producers $1 billion, according to the Associated Press.
The recalls have severely hurt the nation’s peanut producers, weakening prices for their peanuts and limiting their ability to sell their products, Dan Koehler, head of the peanut commission, was to tell a subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Small Business on Wednesday.
“The men and women who inspect our foods and test the safety of our medicines are chemists and physicians, veterinarians and pharmacists,” Obama said during his announcement. “It is because of the work they do each and every day that the United States is one of the safest places in the world to buy groceries at a supermarket or pills at a drugstore.
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“But in recent years, we’ve seen a number of problems with the food making its way to our kitchen tables. In 2006, it was contaminated spinach. In 2008, it was salmonella in peppers and possibly tomatoes. And just this year, bad peanut products led to hundreds of illnesses and cost nine people their lives – a painful reminder of how tragic the consequences can be when food producers act irresponsibly and government is unable to do its job.
“Worse, these incidents reflect a troubling trend that’s seen the average number of outbreaks from contaminated produce and other foods grow to nearly 350 a year – up from 100 a year in the early 1990s,” according to the text of Obama’s speech.
Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg is an international leader in public health and medicine, according to the White House. She is an expert on global health, public health systems, infectious disease, bioterrorism and emergency preparedness.
For six years, Hamburg was health commissioner for the City of New York and as the assistant director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.
Hamburg served as the founding vice president of the biological program of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Before that, she was assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr. Joshua “Josh” Sharfstein is health commissioner for Baltimore. Sharfstein has led national efforts to protect children from unsafe jewelry and over-the-counter medications. He also has worked to make sure disabled Americans have access to prescription drugs.
He is a member of the Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice of the Institute of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.