POLITICS VERSUS SCIENCE: APPORTIONING ... - Buffalo State

eorganization (described above), would not provide the necessary protection.
Regulation should take the form, not of an informational agency, but a European Food
and Public Health Authority, an agency 11 with the combined scope of the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This authority
would break new ground, as it would be the first time the control function for a social
policy would be removed from the Commission and Member States. According to the
authors, the current regulatory configuration artificially compartmentalized risk factors to
human health. Their solution took into account two factors: the science-based notion of
interconnectedness among animals, the environment, and humans (depicted in Figure 2)
and the interconnectedness in risk assessment, communication, and management
(depicted in Figure 1).
Furthermore, they traced the failure of the EU to contravene food crises to an
artificial separation of risk assessment, communication, and management among the
regulatory and implementing parties, concluding that “systems need to be in place to
show the links with policy-making, risk management, control and audit processes which
are capable of rapid and effective action” (James et al. 1999; 14). Hence, two new
notions—the systems approach to food safety and the close interaction required in
assessing, communicating, and controlling risk—informed their proposal for a European
11 The authors (1999, 40) recommend “Authority…because it is distinctive and immediately specifies a
different entity from the Agency concept which is so familiar to Commission officials and Member State
policy-makers. It has also, in English, the ring of excellence and the ability to respond which may be
helpful given the recent crises.”
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