Lead-contaminated applesauce pouches expose issues with food safety oversight

Helena Bottemiller Evich:

Yeah, in this case, we`re learning about some of the holes and limitations of FDA`s jurisdiction. So in this situation, in particular, it was a company in Ecuador that made the pouches and FDA was able to get access to that plant and test the cinnamon, they found extremely high levels of lead, like off the charts, I mentioned 2,000 times higher than international safety standards. So really high levels.

They also found chromium, which is another metal that we don`t know a lot about, but it potentially suggest lead chromate was the culprit here. So probably points to economic adulteration, lead chromate can be used to make spices appear brighter. It also contains lead. So it is very much something we want to keep out of the spice supply.

In this situation, FDA was not able to go further up the supply chain to the cinnamon supplier, because that cinnamon supplier is not sending food directly to the US. So we`re finding some limitations just in terms of what FDA is able to do. Ecuador is continuing to investigate, though I`ve had a lot of trouble getting updates from Ecuador about how that investigation is going.

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