LA TIMES: Report calls for new food safety oversight

Adding to the chorus seeking an overhaul of the nation's food safety system, a report issued Wednesday called on the Obama administration to put someone in charge of safeguarding the food supply and to create a Food Safety Administration.

The food safety system is "plagued with problems," said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of Trust for America's Health, which released the report in conjunction with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Calls for reform of the Food and Drug Administration have only become louder since the salmonella outbreak linked to peanut products late last year. Voluntary product recalls are still being announced; the outbreak has sickened nearly 700 people in 46 states and possibly caused nine deaths.

"We are way overdue for a makeover," said Michelle Larkin, director of the foundation's Public Health Team. "It costs us around $44 billion annually in medical care and lost productivity, so the stakes are really high."

BBC NEWS: Obama warns of US food 'hazard'

President Barack Obama has said the US food safety system is a "public health hazard" and in need of an overhaul.

He sounded the warning during his weekly radio and video address, as he appointed a new head of the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

New York Health Commissioner Margaret Hamburg has been named for the post.

MSNBC: Is the FDA a broken agency?

WASHINGTON - Tainted peanuts. Unsterilized syringes. Salmonella in Mexican chili peppers. A contaminated blood thinner from China that sent patients into life-threatening shock.

Every few months, the Food and Drug Administration goes into fire-brigade mode, rushing to get control over another safety crisis. The agency that regulates products worth 25 cents of every dollar spent by U.S. consumers seems overwhelmed by its own mission.

Some say the FDA is broken, and others want to break it up — by moving food safety to a new office.

YAHOO/AP: AP Exclusive: Bad peanuts found before outbreak

WASHINGTON – Weeks before the earliest signs of a national salmonella outbreak that now has been traced to peanuts from a Georgia processing plant, peanuts exported by the same company were found to be contaminated and were returned to the United States, The Associated Press has learned.

The rejected shipment — coming over the U.S. border across a bridge between New York and Canada — was logged by the Food and Drug Administration but never was tested by federal inspectors, according to the government's own records.

USA TODAY: FDA: Keep a lid on some peanut butter snacks for now

Americans who like peanut butter cookies, crackers, candy and ice cream were told over the weekend to stop eating anything — for now — that they have in their cupboards containing that ingredient.

The Food and Drug Administration is asking consumers to avoid foods that may be contaminated until it has cleared them. FDA staff are working to track what products contain salmonella-tainted peanut butter and paste made in a Georgia manufacturing plant.