As the debate over how to reform the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and supervision of our nation’s food safety oversight continues, a recent study by George Washington University Medical Center (GWU) reminds everyone that the lion’s share of food safety efforts are run at the local and state levels.

For instance, when food inspectors raid and close a restaurant for poor sanitation or unclean kitchens, those inspectors are generally employed by local governments. And it is the state, not the federal government, responsible for issuing health certificates for factories and food service industries.

The GWU report, Stronger Partnerships for Safer Food, was produced by the Food Safety Research Consortium, which includes the Association of Food and Drug Officials, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the National Association of County and City Health Officials and was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The primary sources of the report’s criticisms and recommendations were derived from three workshops involving dozens of health experts, consumer groups and executives from across the country, including the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the USDA, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, the National Restaurant Association, H.J. Heinz Company, the International Food Information Council, and the United Food & Commercial Workers.

The report’s basic finding is that—to be effective—any reforms to food safety oversight must involve local and state food safety agencies.

Unfortunately, local and federal food safety oversight personnel, local health departments and the FDA aren’t working together very well right now. Many times, when local agencies discover a food borne illnesses, they may not choose to share the names of the victims with the Centers for Disease Control for fear violating privacy laws. And conversely, when the FDA obtains a food distribution list during a recall or food borne illness outbreak, the FDA doesn’t always share these lists with the local agencies that are charged with checking store shelves to make sure the product is recalled properly.

What’s worse, many states don’t have the funding to employ a local epidemiologist, so the support that local communities get varies nationwide. The new report from George Washington University isn’t just a stone throwing exercise. It offers 27 detailed findings on the strengths and weaknesses of our current system but also offers 19 specific recommendations for improvement.

These recommendations call on Congress to give federal agencies a mandate to begin collaborating with the 3,000 local and state public health agencies involved in food safety nationwide. Furthermore, the report recommends that these local, state and federal food safety agencies would be better served and organized through the establishment of a network of regional, federally-funded food borne outbreak response centers to investigate outbreaks. Each of these centers would be staffed by local, state and federal epidemiologists and environmental health officials.

We at keepyourfoodsafe.org feel that perhaps the most important point in the report is simply this: “State and local agencies collectively conduct many more inspections, test many more food samples for harmful contamination, and bring many more food safety enforcement actions than the federal food safety agencies. Food safety will not be complete—or successful—unless the efforts of these agencies are strengthened and integrated more fully into the national food safety system.”