News release: “Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the first New York senator to sit on the Senate Agriculture Committee in nearly 40 years, today announced a comprehensive plan to overhaul the nation’s food safety laws by improving inspection, recall response, and public education. A cornerstone of Senator Gillibrand’s plan is new legislation to mandate E. coli inspections of ground beef. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), every year an estimated 87 million Americans are sickened by contaminated food, 371,000 are hospitalized with food-borne illness, and 5,700 die from food-related disease. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made some progress improving food safety regulations, the nation’s food safety laws have not been significantly overhauled in more than a century, according to the Congressional Research Service.”