By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety & Nutrition Fellow

While it’s an exciting time to be a food safety and nutrition advocate, it is also a time of great frustration and many challenges.  It I could write the President’s New Year’s Resolutions related to food, here’s what I would put on that list.

1. Release the long-delayed FSMA rules: When the President signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in 2011, it was a proud and exciting moment for all those who care about food safety.  Unfortunately, there has been quite a delay in the implementation of the law.  Most notably, four integral rules have been stalled for over a year at OMB.  It’s time to prevent further outbreaks of foodborne illness by giving FDA the tools to prevent rather than simply responding to foodborne illnesses.
2. Congress needs to pass a farm bill:  Theoretically, Congress passes a farm bill every five years. This bill governs not only farm policy for the nation, but also conservation and nutrition programs. Unfortunately, this year’s farm bill has become yet another victim of partisan bickering in Washington.  Come the new year, consumers will begin to feel the effects of this, as programs revert to older legislation. Dairy prices in particular are predicted to rise precipitously without a new farm bill.  Let’s pass a farm bill that will protect consumers.
3. Establish more coordinated efforts to ensure food safety: A recent report by USDA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) on the safety of shell eggs highlighted the fact that there is a need for increased coordination between the various agencies that work on food safety. One of the classic examples of this lack of coordination is a factory that makes pizza; it the pizza is a cheese pizza, then FDA has jurisdiction over its safety, whereas if it is a sausage or pepperoni pizza, USDA has jurisdiction.
4. Keep politics out of the development of regulations: OK, so this may be the most ambitious of my resolutions. However, I strongly believe in the idea that government regulations should be science-based and should protect the consumer. An example of politics getting too involved in policy came last year when Congress got involved in new USDA rules that would have placed reasonable limitations on the amount of potatoes that could be served in school lunches. We need to minimize the impact of shifting politics on important policies.

By Ayanna Johnson, Health Policy Associate

This post originally appeared at Mom’sRising.org.

The burden of asthma on the health care system continues to grow in the 21^st Century. Asthma effects more than 25 million Americans (8 percent of the population). Since 2001, the number of people diagnosed with asthma increased by 4.3 million, resulting in a 6 percent rise in overall healthcare costs. In 2007 alone, asthma was estimated to cost the United States $56 billion in health care costs and lost productivity.

Children have experienced increasing rates of asthma especially those living in areas with unclean air.  About 1 in 10 children have asthma, compared to 1 in 12 adults. The Centers for Disease Control reported that the largest rise in asthma, almost a 50 percent increase in new cases from 2001 to 2009, was among African American children.

Asthma, the chronic inflammation and constriction of the airways, can be treated and managed with appropriate medication. Almost half of all people with asthma in the United States have had an asthma attack; many of which could have been prevented with proper management. As, the incidence of asthma continues to grow, managing asthma is important to prevent further strain on the health care system.

Costs rise for asthmatics who do not take their medication as directed, leading to more missed days of school or work, hospitalizations and re-admissions and general decline in quality of life. A recent study found that 50 percent of children aren’t taking their medicine as prescribed, often because parents were afraid of medication side effects.  Approximately 11 percent of insured patients can’t afford their asthma medicine. Increasing the patient share of out-of-pocket costs for children’s asthma medications, led to more children needing emergency treatment for complications related to asthma (Karaca-Mandi et al 2012, JAMA).

Following a medication plan, or medication adherence, is important for asthmatics; it improves health outcomes and decreases overall costs. There are numerous reasons why people don’t take their medication as directed. It can be hard to understand that a condition like asthma is a chronic disease that needs to be managed daily.

Helping patients, parents, and caregivers understand asthma and talk with their health care providers about medication management can help to lower asthma health care costs and unnecessary emergencies. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute recommends developing an asthma action plan tailored to each individual to help control asthma, avoiding triggers for asthma, remaining physically active and consistently monitoring your asthma with your health care provider for changes.

The Script Your Future campaign, organized and developed by the National Consumers League, helps address the medication adherence problem for major chronic diseases, including asthma.  Patients need access to education to help take control of their asthma, especially for reasons that make sense to them. This campaign provides tools to manage medicines and sample questions to help start a conversation between patients and their   doctor, pharmacist or nurse about their medicine.  It also has information to help patients understand their condition. Many things—from allergies to poor air quality, stress, and anxiety—can trigger asthma. This  video explains more about what causes asthma and what patients can do to manage their health.  An important step to becoming adherent is to make the commitment to take your medicine. Script Your Future has a pledge tool—patients can pledge to take their medicines or even pledge to help their child take their medicine too.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

I read something unexpected in the Wall Street Journal (November 20, 2012) recently. William E. Conway, Jr., co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with assets of more than $150 billion in management, the third largest such firm in the world, wrote an Op-Ed piece entitled,“Why We’re Investing in America.” Conway noted that his firm has invested in nearly every region of the world over 25 years, but these days they are putting their investments in the United States because, in his words:

The US is characterized by inherent attributes that are often taken for granted: freedom, the rule of law, confidence in regulatory agencies. America has admired universities, the deepest and most-liquid capital markets, peerless medical systems and pockets of innovation such as Silicon Valley-all of which, though not perfect, are highly advanced and function smoothly. Nowhere on the globe can my firm invest in companies with as much confidence as we do in the US. And while we take comfort in the long-term safety of US assets, we also see opportunities for growth. This is because of a combination of very low interest rates, a strengthening housing market, and significant domestic energy discoveries.

I don’t know much about Conway except that he’s very rich and the Carlyle Group has been implicated in dealings with the Bush family, Middle East and even Osama Bin Laden, and recently bought a chain of nursing homes. They undoubtedly invest in some odious companies and industries. But I’m making a different point. I quote from Conway’s piece because I think it’s an astounding acknowledgement from a powerful US businessman that the United States, for all of our strict regulations and our corporate taxation that business loves to complain about – is a great place to invest precisely because we don’t suffer from widespread corruption, we have a highly educated and productive workforce, and orderly markets that are strictly regulated (not strictly enough, as we learned from the disastrous sub prime debacle of a few years ago and as former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair points out with frequency in her excellent book, Bull By the Horns) and business thrives under these conditions. Indeed, Conway talks of confidence in regulatory agencies in the US; they are predictable and they operate under the rules of administrative law. Conway ends the piece with this:

Many in America and beyond have been paralyzed by fear of the fiscal cliff, frustrated with Washington’s partisanship, mesmerized by the presidential election or stunned by the post-Great Recession recovery. Any way you look at it, though, now is a great time to invest – and there is no better place than America.

His Op-Ed tells us that a strong regulatory structure that attempts to keep capitalism in check is not only good for consumers, citizens and taxpayers, but also good for business.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Several weeks ago I dropped by my local book store to hear former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Director Sheila Bair read from her new book, “Bull by the Horns.” The place was packed. I had no idea so many people would come out to hear her read and be so eager to talk about the FDIC’s role in the near-collapse of the economy and the sub-prime lending debacle.

The FDIC plays a critical role in protecting bank depositors and overseeing the bank to ensure they are making wise investments and their finances are sound. When they are not, the FDIC can also oversee the process of winding down a bank’s business. The agency was created after the Great Depression to prevent a repeat of the run on banks by depositors desperate to get their money out for fear of losing it all. Today the agency ensures most bank deposits up to $250,000.

I admit that when I bought the book for the NCL library I thought, “I’ll never get around to reading this; furthermore, it’s probably a snooze.” I opened up the first page, began to read, and was hooked. It reminded me why Sheila Bair was always held in such high esteem in the consumer community during her tenure at the FDIC. She was often a voice in the wilderness, standing by her beliefs that investors–and not taxpayers–be on the hook if a bank or investment firm failed. She was frequently fighting NY Fed and then Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, OCC’s John Dugan, and the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and was often the only woman. As such she was routinely excluded from meetings and decisions involving the other regulatory agencies.

Bair paints a picture of her counterparts at the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, all financial heads of agencies – especially Geithner – as being more interested in protecting the big banks and Wall Street, rather than taxpayers, especially Citibank, where Geithner had close ties. Geithner, Bair says, was often eager to commit FDIC’s funds to help bail out firms that had engaged in high risk lending and slip shod investment practices. Bair resisted them at different times, and though she chose her battles carefully, they pilloried her for it. She also compromised more than she felt comfortable doing, if only to be a team player and put in place stronger standards in place for risk-taking among financial institutions. The expression that “Wall Street wants risk socialized and profits privatized” applies never seems more fitting than when reading Bair’s book.

I highly recommend it. It has some good Washington gossip and more than a few glimpses inside the world of the Washington financial regulators. Her meetings with President Obama are far more positive than her interactions with his appointees. It makes you wonder why the President put Wall Street types like Geithner and Summers in charge of agencies that needed an independent, fair-minded regulator.

If I ever run into that guy named Barack Obama, I’m going to recommend he read the book and think about Sheila Bair for Secretary of Treasury. That would be a great appointment.