Mr. FEINGOLD. Madam President, I am pleased to support S. 1082, the Food and Drug Administration Revitalization Act of 2007. This much-needed legislation improves our country's prescription drug and medical device safety, and responds to problems that Congress is long overdue in addressing. This legislation strengthens the Food and Drug Administration, a body that has been continually underfunded and weakened by political and corporate interests. While I would like to see an even stronger bill passed, this legislation drastically improves our current policies that regulate the FDA.

My constituents in Wisconsin largely trust that their food, medications, and medical devices are safe. I generally trust that they are as well. We all depend on the FDA to ensure that our lives are not jeopardized by faulty products or contaminated food. However, recently a steady stream of dangerous drugs, food and devices have made their way into Americans' homes. Vioxx, antidepressant drugs for children, salmonella poisoning in food, pet food contaminations--these are just a few of the most publicized instances that have harmed and even killed people in our country.

Numerous investigations have been conducted in order to better understand why these events have occurred. The conclusions to these studies have found that we need a better FDA . We need to provide the agency with the legal authority necessary to ensure our safety, and we need to provide the FDA with the necessary funding to do its job. It is clear that the agency's authority has been watered down over the years as a result of corporate influence, and our citizens have suffered the consequences. This bill takes important steps to put safety over profit margins, and it has been long awaited.

I commend the immense bipartisan effort that has been put into crafting this legislation. This is not an easy topic to tackle. It is a complex topic rife with political infighting, but today we have legislation that both parties and even many companies are fine with. Granted, the bill may be too far-reaching for some, and for others like me, it doesn't necessarily go far enough, but this is something that will pass that is a vast improvement from current law.

I was glad to support Senator Durbin's amendment to improve the FDA's oversight and ability to respond to contaminated pet food. Like the bill as a whole, I think we need to do more to ensure that the ingredients used in both pet and human food are free from contamination, but this amendment was an important step in the right direction. The amendment strengthens the standards for pet food processing and ingredients and at the same time improves the FDA's ability to react to a problem through better detection, an adulterated food registry, and improved communication with the public. I hope this will be a platform for improving Federal oversight of the human food supply, which has been shown many times over the last year to be at risk.

In my home State of Wisconsin, the outbreak of E.coli last summer, later linked to bagged spinach, killed an elderly woman and sickened at least fifty others. The spinach was traced back to four fields on four ranches in California. The FDA itself admits that ``There has been a long history of E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks involving leafy greens from the central California region'', and yet mostly depends on the industry to self-regulate. In fact, on the FDA Web site about this particular outbreak, it says, ``[the] FDA and the State of California expect the industry to develop a comprehensive plan which is designed to minimize the risk of another outbreak.'' I am concerned that all too often the FDA is allowing the food industry to dictate the rules and whether to implement food safety protections. This bill is a step in the right direction, but more steps are likely needed and I look forward to working with my colleagues on these.

Along these lines, I was glad to offer an amendment and have it accepted in the bill that would require the FDA to resume annual reports on the level of pesticide residues in domestic and imported food and agricultural products. Moreover, my amendment requires the FDA to make the report more useful for Congress and the public. Specifically the amendment requires the FDA to work with other agencies to include similar data collected by other government agencies, conduct more advanced statistical analysis, report on efforts to prevent smuggling through mislabeling one product as another, and target future testing on products or countries, in the case of exports, that show relatively more prohibited pesticides. The recent headlines about contaminated Chinese wheat gluten clearly show a need to get a better handle on food safety. So it clearly wasn't the time for the FDA to end reporting on pesticide residues and this amendment follows the larger theme of the bill in improving our food safety oversight.

While this pesticide residue amendment is important to improve consumers' confidence in the food they eat, it also can be important for U.S. farmers. For example, Wisconsin's ginseng growers have suffered a double insult over the past few years--facing unfair competition from imported ginseng that was treated with chemicals illegal in the U.S. and then often having that ginseng misbranded as the superior quality Wisconsin ginseng. My amendment and the improved pesticide residue data and ability to focus on certain products should help FDA identify and seize unsafe products such as contaminated ginseng imports.

On another note, I am disappointed that the bill does not actually allow importing lower cost prescription drugs. While the Dorgan-Snowe amendment was accepted in the bill, it was modified and effectively nullified by the Cochran amendment, which I strongly opposed

A competitive marketplace for prescription drugs will help in containing the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs. Over the past 4 years, I have worked in a bipartisan fashion to allow the safe importation of prescription drugs from abroad. I am a proud cosponsor of the Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act, which the provisions in the Dorgan-Snowe amendment were based on. This legislation would have allowed the importation of FDA -approved drugs from countries with FDA -comparable regulations, such as Canada. This legislation will finally allow the importation of safe and affordable prescriptions drugs to the United States.

As I travel around Wisconsin listening to people's concerns, the high cost of health care continues to be at the top of the list, and this includes prescription drugs. The strong bipartisan support for reimportation makes clear that Americans of all political backgrounds want the Federal Government to support consumers, rather than the interests of drug companies, and make safe and affordable prescription drugs available to those who need them. The failure to include strong reimportation legislation in this bill is unfortunate, but we are getting closer to enacting reimportation with each vote. I fully expect this to pass in the near future, and I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting efforts to legalize reimportation. As I stated earlier, I will support the final FDA Revitalization Act, but I am disappointed that strong reimportation language is not included.