Contaminants in Flood Waters Threaten Food Part I: Who is Watching?
Farming near a river bed is a great idea until it floods. Soil near riverbeds tends to be more fertile, producing more abundant crops. But when the river beds flood and drench contiguous farm land, the water can drag unwanted contaminants to the farmland, exposing health risks to anyone eating the crops from the flooded land. What kinds of contaminants? Anything in the flooded water: machine oil, sewage, garbage, medical waste, manure.
As a Midwesterner and a doctor with an interest in both public health and food, I really wanted to find out who in the federal government was monitoring food grown on flooded farms to make sure it stays safe, and then blog about it. So far, I have not found the federal agency responsible for monitoring the safety of food grown on flooded farms. I checked first with the Centers for Disease Control, but the spokesperson there said they only monitored disease outbreaks after they had started occurring. She suggested I call the Environmental Protection Agency. The woman I spoke with in media relations at the EPA here in Chicago also said that her agency was not responsible for food safety, only environmental toxins (I kind of thought they were linked), and suggested I call the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Now FEMA has gotten a bum rap since they kind of forgot to rescue tens of thousands of people in New Orleans when that city floodedin 2005, so I decided to give the agency a break and not push too hard. I asked a FEMA spokesperson in Wisconsin about food safety, one of the states hit hard by flooding and she set me straight: “We normally don’t even deal with that issue.”
So now I am asking you, dear Planetsave reader: Can you help me learn who is keeping our food supply safe? Please contact me with your suggestions in the comment section.
Photo thanks to Shannonpatrick17 at flickr.com.
Thanks everyone for all of your comments and suggestions. I have contacted the FDA, but I have not heard back yet. I will update you when I learn more.
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Flooding & its effects is ancient. The Nile was the lifeblood of Egypt & preserved it from the desert. This is famously expressed in the Joseph story in Genesis, where Joseph interprets Pharoah’s dream of 7 fat cows coming up out of the river & then being devoured by 7 lean cows that ate the fat cows (no bull) as predicting 7 good years followed by 7 years of famine. Whatever went into or lived in the Nile is nothing like what we provide with modern chemicals. What agency should be consulted? I suggest The White House with a new occupant. You get 3 guesses as to my recommendation for this post as he will install the next EPA administrator.
[...] hear back from a spokeswoman at the USDA to find out the answer to the question I posed last week: who is in charge of protecting us from crops affected by flood water? In the meantime, I got an alert from the Centers for Disease Control about contaminated water in [...]