The Food and Drug Administration, the nation’s chief watchdog on food safety, is too often caught flat-footed when problems arise, a health advisory panel said Tuesday, urging the agency to focus more on preventing outbreaks of illness by targeting facilities and products most likely to make people sick. The panel said the FDA is trying to apply so-called risk-based management in food safety in piecemeal fashion and does not have an overall plan, or the money, to implement it effectively. The assessment came in a report from the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academies. Making the recommended reforms so the FDA heads off problems instead of trying to solve them after they crop up would require ‘a cultural change, a different way of doing business,’ said the study’s main author, Dr. Robert Wallace of the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health. Devising a proactive plan would include pulling together fragmented food safety information in a master database that would allow the FDA, other federal, state and local agencies, and industry to share information to prevent food borne illnesses, the report said. ‘You want to put your limited resources where they’ll do […]