Last week, more than 500 million eggs were recalled from Iowa because of a severe scare that the eggs may have carried salmonella. As a result, an outbreak of more than 1,500 cases of salmonella poisoning has been reported.

This outbreak may have been prevented if the Senate had passed a food safety bill passed by the House in July 2009.

A Senate bipartisan group released a compromise amendment to the bill on Aug. 12 — the day before Wright County Egg, one of the two egg farms involve in the recent salmonella scare, announced its first recall.

The bill would impose stricter rules on inspections, increase the frequency of inspections and grant the Food and Drug Administration the power to authorize recalls and allow access to company records.

What regulators need are “more tools, and probably better tools, to prevent these events from happening,” said Craig Hedburg, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, who thinks the legislation would provide just that, Fortune Magazine reports.

The current law, which has been in force for more than 70 years, does not allow the FDA to authorize recalls.

This means that the FDA can only ask those responsible to remove the products, but the responsible party does not have to obey the request.

Thus, the recall does not always come in a timely manner because the company is afraid of losing profits as a result of the recall.

That delay results in more people being affected by the problem associated with the recall.

If the proposed legislation passes, the FDA would be able to quickly issue a recall, forcing the responsible party to withdraw the product without first worrying about how the recall would affect the company.

This ability to enforce a recall should not be taken lightly and requirements of the FDA to prove the need for a recall prior to enforcing one should be an expectation of Congress.

An FDA report initiated after the contamination found that Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms were filthy and had poor sanitation in the areas where the hens were kept.

The report even detailed instances of rodents, wild birds and hens escaping from their cages, which could have contributed to the salmonella.

At Hillandale Farms, laboratory tests confirmed there was salmonella in water used to wash eggs before they were packaged.

A report on Wright County Egg described pits that had chicken manure piled 4 to 8 feet high.

According to The Washington Post, the FDA had never previously inspected the two farms.

If an agency, like the FDA, had conducted a thorough inspection of the farms before the salmonella outbreak, inspectors could have seen the potential problems at the farms and might have been able to avoid the situation.

One of the more obvious solutions to this problem is to enhance and increase the oversight powers of the FDA.

If the proposed legislation passes, the FDA would impose stricter rules on inspections so that problems could be caught well before more than 1,500 people in the country suffer.

Furthermore, if a problem were discovered, the FDA would be able to access company records and issue a quick recall, if necessary.

The proposed legislation should be passed when the Senate returns this month. With the new legislation, the FDA would have more power to avoid another salmonella poisoning episode.