Chris Murphy: “Let me give you a quote that comes from one of these hearings and you decide, we will let the public decide and our…”

“Let me give you a quote that comes from one of these hearings and you decide, we will let the public decide and our colleagues decide whether or not this is good information that maybe we should have out there. David Kessler, who is the former FDA official and one of the acknowledged experts on food safety in this country, Kessler says, ``We have no structure,'' in this country, ``for preventing food-borne illness. The reality is that there is currently no mandate, no leadership, no resources, nor scientific research base for prevention of food safety problems.'' I think that's probably information that we should know, that one of the leading officials, one of the leading experts on food safety and food regulation in this country believes that we have absolutely no ability to control the quality of food coming into this country. He knows what we know, the amount of inspections has dropped precipitously. We did about 50,000 food inspections in 1972. We do 5,000 now in 2000. We have dropped by 90 percent over the last 30 years the amount of food inspections we do. We have these experts out there who had these opinions that they couldn't share because Congress wasn't doing oversight.”