U.S. Food and Drug Administration - April 2000 Progress and Perspective Food Safety Initiative FY '99 Annual Report

FDA Awards Food Safety Grants

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FDA enhanced its ability to meet its goals by awarding grants to the food safety community at the state and local level and to academic institutions. In FY 99, FDA awarded grants for innovative food safety projects to 11 state and local regulatory agencies. This pilot program is intended to complement, develop or improve state and local food safety programs that may also be used in other state or local jurisdictions. These grants, which total nearly $500,000 are for a one-year period and were awarded in four key areas: 1) inspection, 2) regulation and compliance, 3) information systems and 4) education and health information dissemination. Richard Barnes, director of FDA's Division of Federal-State Relations, said the other state and local agencies will be able to take the results of the projects and use them in their own areas. Grants were also awarded to universities to support research in food safety to: 1) reduce the incidence of foodborne illness by improving the ability to detect and control pathogens in the food supply and 2) develop better data and modeling techniques to assess the exposure of the population to microbial contaminants and the range of health consequences of that exposure. Nine proposals were funded for multi-year research projects. Marianne Miliotis, coordinator of FSI's extramural research said, "By establishing a collaborate effort between scientists and FDA, not only will we be able to meet our research goals, but we also expect to increase the dialog between government scientists and the greater scientific community for developing new technologies to keep the public safe from foodborne illness, and to stimulate interest in food safety research."