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Dairy Suing FDA Over Interstate Ban on Raw Milk

China Agriculture Report By CnAgriChina Agriculture Report Print
Keywords:Dairy Suing Over


Organic Pastures, the nation's largest raw milk dairy, has launched a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for allegedly turning its back on the dairy's request for the agency to change its current law banning sales of raw milk across state lines. Food Safety News reports that the California-based dairy submitted its request to the agency back in December 2008. According to statute, the FDA is supposed to respond to this sort of request in 180 days. The FDA promotes this administrative procedure as a way to examine issues such as this to see if changes should be made.

Raw milk is milk that hasn't been pasteurized to kill potentially harmful, and at times deadly, pathogens such as E. coli, Listeria, Salmonella and Campylobacter, all of which have been been linked to raw milk food poisoning outbreaks in a number of states across the nation.

In a similar lawsuit filed last year by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which focused on the agency's ban on interstate sales of raw milk, FDA faulted the defense fund for bypassing this administrative procedure. It told the court that filing a citizen petition allows the FDA to consider and address plaintiffs concerns and could potentially resolve those concerns, or at the very least might crystalize the issues in contention. The federal court dismissed the case in April 2012.

The suit by Organic Pastures was filed on Dec. 12, 2012 in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of California. It names Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, as the agencies they head, as defendants.


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