The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) international program has logged nearly 75,000 hits to its web pages on the new food safety law, as foreign companies that export food to the United States scramble to learn how the law affects them.

“A lot of our foreign offices are being deluged with questions,” says Mary Lou Valdez, FDA’s associate commissioner for international programs. “The China office has done significant outreach with Chinese officials and exporters” and translations of the law into 11 languages are popular downloads.

Valdez says FDA translated the Food Safety and Modernization Act, which became law earlier this year, into 11 languages using eight different alphabets. Excluding English, they include the five other, official United Nations languages—Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish—and six languages that represent the top countries from which the United States imports food—Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, and Hindi.

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