Few bottled-water recalls being made public

Few bottled-water recalls being made public

Lack of hard and fast rules on what requires notification gives consumers a misleading impression, public-interest group says

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency often finds problems with bottled water, but doesn't tell the public about them.

Canada's federal food watchdog issued 29 recall notices for bottled water products between
2000 and early 2008, citing deficiencies such as contamination by bacteria, moulds, glass chips and trace amounts of arsenic.

Of the recalls, affecting 49 different products, it issued a public warning in only seven cases, two of which came after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made public its recall orders.

The total number of recalls was obtained through an Access to Information Act request by the Polaris Institute, an Ottawa-based public-interest group that wants to curb bottled water use.

The group compared the recall notices on the government list with those made public on the agency's website, and found no record for most of them.

The institute contends the CFIA, by not revealing the extent of its recall activity, is giving consumers a misleading impression about the quality of bottled water.

"Recalls are happening and coupled with that they're not widely publicized," said Joe Cressy, a spokesman for the institute.

The "occasional Web entry is not showing the full scale" of the problems in bottled water, he said.

The group sought help from the CFIA to determine whether there were online recall orders it missed, but wasn't given a response pointing to any.

The agency defended its disclosure practices, saying it conducts health-risk assessments and issues public recall notices based on the degree of danger an item poses.

CFIA food safety and recall specialist Garfield Balsom said in an interview that other countries follow the same approach and don't automatically issue notices because consumers would be soon be overwhelmed by publicity over recalls, most of which would pose low risks. Sometimes products deemed dangerous enough to recall are still in warehouses and not on store shelves, for example. "There are downsides to publicizing everything," he said.

Although bottled water has an image as being clean and pristine, the CFIA's list of 29 recalls indicates most of the products yanked from the market were for microbiological contamination, quality problems termed "pathogenic" in the access document.

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