A whistleblower complaint sent in October to the Food and Drug Administration detailed sanitation issues at an Abbott infant formula factory, but the top food safety official reportedly didn't see it for months.
The deputy commissioner for food policy and response at the FDA, Frank Yiannas, told The Washington Post he didn't see the whistleblower complaint for four months.
It wasn’t sent to me and it wasn’t shared with me internally. How does this happen?” Yiannas asks in his WaPo interview. “There were early signals, and in any safety profession you want to take those seriously to stop the domino effect. That didn’t happen.
Yiannas' interview comes as families across America are being heavily impacted by a baby formula shortage.
The shuttering of Abbott's aforementioned formula factory in Sturgis, Michigan following a string of infant hospitalizations due to bacterial infections has only exacerbated the supply issues of formula in the country.
A former quality assurance worker sent their whistleblower report on the Sturgis plant to the FDA in October, WaPo says, alleging that while Abbott did remove some products from distribution following news about the caused infant hospitalizations, other batches of the possibly affected formula still made it to shelves.
Yiannas reportedly wasn't even aware of that whistleblower report until February, four months after it was sent.
Around the same time, Abbott announced it was recalling several of its formula products, a decision...
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