Meet David Acheson: Your Stomach's Best Friend

It was not a blockbuster. You can buy it for just a penny on Amazon (plus $3.99 shipping), where its sales ranking was at No. 2,440,973 yesterday. But writing it piqued Acheson's interest in other food-borne diseases and helped persuade him to take a medical officer job at the FDA in 2002, after becoming a U.S. citizen.

"I found myself more and more frequently in a role as a food safety spokesperson for the agency, and that really took off with spinach," Acheson said, referring to last fall's packaged-spinach crisis. "One thing led to the next. Spinach moved on to tacos. Tacos moved on to peanut butter. Then melamine," the pet food contaminant that also got into pigs, fish and chickens for human consumption.

It was then that FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach asked him to be the agency's first food safety cz . . . -- um -- assistant commissioner.

The task is huge, encompassing a thorough rethinking of how to reduce the toll from food-borne illness. First Acheson wants to speed up the trace-back process by which investigators figure out the source of an outbreak. Longer-term, he wants to work with industry and academia to see where in the food-distribution system contamination is most likely to occur and to devise strategies to fix those weak points.

He also is responsible for communicating risk to the public when outbreaks occur, a difficult task, given the public's emotional relationship to food and people's tendency to distrust government assurances.

Acheson does have personal experience to draw upon. In Britain, he once got a walloping case of food poisoning. "It was one of those ones that hits you about 2 a.m., and you throw up continuously for about 12 hours," he said. He also got felled in India. "My God, I was sick as a dog."

Acheson eats a lot of organic food -- not because he thinks it's safer, but because his wife works at an organic food co-op in Clarksville. He also credits her for getting him to exercise more -- he ran the Baltimore Marathon in 2002, finishing in just over four hours.

But his joints complained, and, these days, he spends his free time gardening, skiing, hiking and -- wouldn't you know it? -- watching his favorite: the Food Network.

"Our food supply is really incredibly safe," Acheson emphasized. "We all eat food three or four times a day or more, and we don't get sick but rarely. Billions of servings of all kinds of food get consumed without any problem."

Yet new challenges are looming, he acknowledges, including today's very efficient distribution systems.

"Spinach picked on Monday is at the processor by Wednesday. It's in the consumer's hands by the following Monday and making them sick three days later. And it's in 40 states," he said. "That's quite daunting in terms of how do you get a handle on that. You don't know what's going on. You don't know if it's a deliberate attack, whether it's coming out of one small field in California or through a processor."

The steep rise in imports, driven in part by U.S. consumers' year-round demand for all kinds of food, complicates matters enormously and may drive the FDA to ask Congress for limited extra authority, Acheson said. But, given the huge array of foods that the FDA regulates, "it would take forever to inspect everything," he said. "You would burn so much money for nothing. It wouldn't buy you any fewer outbreaks or any less illness. It would just buy you a bunch of headaches."

Rather, he said, the FDA needs to focus on the foods and countries that pose the biggest risks, including the newest global players.

"The Chinese have gone from zero to 60 really fast," he said. "Even the best system in the world couldn't keep up with that."

Threats can help, Acheson said, and the FDA will strictly enforce U.S. safety standards. But education and creative training will also be crucial, he said.

Chinese-language Food Network, anyone?