Mother Jones reports that the budget cuts proposed by the Republican Party might be fine for the bottom line but it might not be so great for your body. According to Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones, in an article, “These GOP Budget Cuts Might Make You Puke (or Worse)” from March 9, 2011: “If Republicans have their way, food safety could fall casualty to the congressional budget-cutting fervor. Buried in the House GOP's budget bill, which passed last month and would axe $61 billion in spending, are major funding reductions for agricultural inspections. And consumer advocates warn that these cuts could escalate outbreaks of food-borne illnesses.” Khimm wrote that the House budget bill not only “slashes $88 million from the agency that inspects the country's meat and poultry, which could reduce its operations by 18 percent for the remainder of the year,” but these “cuts to the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service could furlough thousands of inspectors and decrease the number of inspections at the nation's slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants.” Such budget cuts would see “fewer inspectors on the job,” in which case “the quality of inspections could also fall by the wayside…” These cuts have the effect of defunding the pay for those scientists who are responsible for examining contaminated products and then determining how to detect tainted foods before they make people sick (or worse). Khimm points out that these “budget rollbacks could result in 10,000 fewer inspections of imported food, less than 1 percent of which is checked in the first place…”
Read the entire insightful and sickening article at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/gop-budget-cuts-food-safety
No comments:
Post a Comment