The USA Today is reporting on the depolyment of one of FDA’s “mobile food-safety labs.” The lab and its inspectors spent a week in Nogales, Arizona, at the Mexican border, testing imported food. The good news is two-fold. First, the inspectors did not come up with a single positive test. Second, they were able to keep the test-and-hold time, i.e. the time a product waits for testing results before rejoining the stream of commerce, to roughly 36 hours.
The bad news is that despite the presence of the mobile labs, the percentage of imported food being tested or inspected before entering the U.S. remains very low.
Imported produce has been linked to food-borne illness outbreaks in the past. Implicated foods have included green onions, jalapeno peppers, and cantaloupe.