A government watchdog review of The Food and Drug Administration indicates that it’s too sluggish in recalling corrupted foods. On Wednesday, The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General evaluated 30 recalls between 2012 and 2015. Companies in two of these reviews did not recall all tainted items until 165 days and 81 days following the FDA’s recognition, according to a Reuter’s report.

“FDA does not have adequate policies and procedures to ensure that firms take prompt and effective action in initiating voluntary food recalls,” the report stated. “As a result, consumers remained at risk of illness or death for several weeks after FDA was aware of a potentially hazardous food in the supply chain.”

The Department of Health and Human Services advised the FDA to fix the delay immediately. Stephen Ostroff and Howard Sklamberg, FDA food safety officials, issued a statement in a blog post saying that the survey’s results were “unacceptable,” but that the agency is “totally committed” to improving food safety.

A member of the House of Representatives subcommittee that is tasked to review the FDA voiced similar opinions. Representative Rosa DeLauro observed a salmonella outbreak in cucumbers last July in which 900 consumers were hospitalized and six died. The outbreak spread through September before a product recall.

“Delays like this one – and others found in the report – are completely unacceptable and leave American consumers at risk for illness and death,” DeLauro said.

Ostroff and Sklamberg said the FDA has devised a framework to reinforce compliance and enforcement policies, including both voluntary and mandatory recalls. But scientific evidence of a potential outbreak needs to be gathered before an official recall can be issued they noted. Cut-off points for recalls are set but “they must be done on an individual basis rather than by setting arbitrary deadlines.”

To improve the FDA’s response times, the FDA has sourced a team of scientists from multiple scientific disciplines to review the prospect of an outbreak Ostroff and Sklamberg indicated. They also point to the FDA’s use of whole genome sequencing to observe the genetic structures of pathogens since 2014.

Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 requires companies to reduce food safety hazards and have contingencies in the event of a food recall.

Alzheimer testing may need to be more comprehensive according to new research. Analysts from the United States and the U.K. after conducting related observations on animals found that patients may benefit from earlier examinations primarily on long-term memory loss, which is not part of clinical tests.

Recognizing Alzheimer’s at an early stage is “widely recognized as a crucial step in the development of effective treatments for the disease,” the researchers say. The report was published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications. They note, however, that the signs of the disease are usually “extremely difficult to observe,” CNBC reports.

Study co-author Richard Morris, of the University of Edinburgh said that the bulk of current research has focused only on severe symptoms that surface later in Alzheimer’s development. But Morris also voices there’s a shortfall with this approach.

“As things developed in the last few years,” Morris told CNBC, “there is a growing sense that by the time Alzheimer’s is fully diagnosed, and plaques are formed in the brains of humans, it is almost too late to do anything. So instead of looking for these great big effects that reproduce the later stages of the syndrome, which was an important first step academically, maybe what we ought to be doing is looking for the needle in the haystack.”

Morris and his colleagues said they want to initiate further dialog about the feasibility of early-stage tests, and whether they may assist in more effective Alzheimer’s drugs.

“If I could put it in its bluntest form, do you wait until Granny or Grandpa have full-blown Alzheimer’s disease and then as a family sit around and say, ‘What should we should do?’ Or from the point of view of trying to think about new drugs, should we actually be looking at the very earliest stages, before there is massive pathology? Perhaps drugs would work much better there, if the brain was in that state than in the more advanced state of pathology.”

As such, Morris and his colleagues took healthy mice against a variable of mice in the initial stages of an Alzheimer’s-like condition and trained them to navigate their way to a hidden pool of water, incorporating a series of signs and markers.

They then tested both mouse classifications a week later and recorded two distinct differences. First, the Alzheimer’s group did markedly worse on the test. During the course, they were mostly incapable of remembering the water dish’s location. Secondly, scientists noticed a  significant drop in glucose levels, a key measure of how much energy their brains were using.

“Our animals not only can’t behaviorally remember what is happening, they are showing a metabolic deficit in the brain, at the same time,” he said.

But Morris urged awareness in drawing conclusions about human health based on animal testing. He also pointed out that some researchers are skeptical of “behavioral” data investigators registered in its study, as opposed to biochemical tests. But, he said, behavioral data is “very important because they relate directly to the human situation.”