Burgeoning global trade is contributing to outbreaks of foodborne illness and exposing weaknesses in the U.S. food safety system, according to Global Food Safety-Keeping Food Safe from Farm to Table, a recent report from the American Academy for Microbiology (AAM) in Washington, D.C.
Food safety standards and practices are not only outdated and overwhelmed by global trade, they are also inconsistently applied from country to country, notes the report, which is based on a colloquium thatAAMconvened in April 2009. The document recommends policy changes and research efforts for improving food safety.
In the United States, global trade has had a dramatic impact on what we eat, says Mike Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia in Athens, who was a cochair of the AAM colloquium. "About 80% of our fish and shellfish is imported and about 45% of our fruits, 15-20% of vegetables, and almost 50% of nuts," he says, adding that these numbers are growing.
Importing these foods allows us to enjoy a fantastic variety of things to eat, but countrywide regulatory frameworks are not adept at ensuring the safety of foods produced outside national borders, according to the report. Kathryn Boor, a colloquium participant and dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says these gaps are considerable and the AAM report predicts that "our fragmented legislation around the world will have a very negative impact on our ability to protect consumers.
"When rules are completely different in one place versus another, who's in charge?" Boor asks. The report recommends harmonizing global food safety management systems and sharing data to prevent contamination of foods and outbreaks of foodborne illness.
Food safety inspections are also patchy. At U.S. borders, for example, fewer than 1% of food shipments are subjected to inspection, while fewer than 0.5% of those shipments are sampled for follow-up safety tests. Further, current methods for testing and sampling foods are inadequate, according to the report, which recommends developing faster, more sensitive techniques.
The United States imports a great deal of food from the developing world. "Many of these countries do not use the same level of sanitary practices in processing and harvesting these foods" as does the United States, Doyle says. Inadequate food safety practices in developing countries have caused a number of well-publicized outbreaks here and also, most likely, profound (but unreported) problems with foodborne illness in some of those countries.
Simple measures to improve those standards, including providing farm and food workers with handwashing facilities, separating livestock from field crops, and using clean water to wash food products, are costly and tend to take a back seat when exporters aim to maximize their profits. "The developed world has resources to maintain high-quality food safety systems, while the developing world does not," says LeeAnn Jaykus, a colloquium participant and professor of Food Science at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "Resource inequity makes it very difficult to tackle food safety from a global perspective."
U.S. consumers represent another big challenge when it comes to improving food safety practices, according to the report. Too often they assume, falsely, that processing destroys all pathogens and that food is safe until proven otherwise. Moreover, many people fail to handle foods properly and may not read or follow safety-related instructions on packaged foods.
Doyle applauds public health efforts that direct consumers to "cook, chill, clean, and separate" various types of ingredients. However, he says about such messages, "I think we're not taking the right approach, in terms of audiences." Thus, it seems a better strategy to head off unsafe food handling habits before they start by targeting food safety messages to elementary and middle school children instead of adults, who tend to be set in their ways.
The AAM reports can be ordered by sending a request to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
Merry R. Buckley
Merry Buckley is a freelance science writer in Ithaca, N.Y. See more of her work at www.mbuckley.net.
 |
Current Topics 
Facebook
del.icio.us
Digg
Furl 
Yahoo!My Web
StumbleUpon
Google
Technorati 
reddit
Twitter
Subscribe to this article's comment feed
Show/Hide comment form