(FDA: Silver Spring, Maryland) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently enhanced its food and feed protection initiatives with the award of three one-year Food Safety and Security Monitoring grants totaling $1 million to the states of Arkansas, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. The funds support cooperative agreements designed to create a national integrated food safety system through enhanced federal and state collaboration in food emergency response activities.

The three states each received $350,000 to fund Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) chemistry laboratories. FERN labs are essential to the FDA’s regulatory efforts and the grants may be used for facility upgrades, training in current food testing methodologies, and increased laboratory sample analysis capacity, and other activities.

In the event of a large-scale event affecting food or food products, the grant recipients may be required to perform selected analyses of food samples collected by the FDA or provided by other government agencies through the FDA.

The state recipients and highlights for each grant include:

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