Extending existing technologies to tackle food-borne illness
Writing in the latest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr Dennis Maki, a professor of medicine and epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsion, claims that removing growth-promoting antibiotics from animal feed, greater use of irradiation, and requiring bar codes for food traceability would help prevent the spread of food-borne illness.
The safety of the US food supply has been in the spotlight recently, as a spate of food-borne illnesses has caused commentators to question the whole food safety system. But Maki believes that the US already has many of the technologies needed to tackle underlying issues.
“We must ask ourselves how food-borne disease can develop in 76 million residents of one of the world’s most technically advanced countries each year, causing 350,000 hospitalizations and 5000 deaths…despite intensive regulation of food production and distribution,” he wrote.
Costly errors
Although Maki’s perspective is published in the wake of the salmonella outbreak which was rapidly linked to peanut products in January, he also mentions the salmonella outbreak between April and August last year, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wrongly pinned on tomatoes, before finding that Mexican jalapeno and serrano peppers were to blame.
The US tomato industry lost an estimated $200m during the outbreak as tomato consumption plummeted.
Bar codes that trace foods to a specific farm, processing plant or distribution center could prevent this kind of costly error in pinpointing the source of contamination, Maki wrote.
In terms of preventing food-borne illness from animal origins, he calls for “an internal moratorium” on growth-promoting antibiotics in feed. These have been linked to less animal resistance to enteropathogens (organisms that cause disease in the digestive tract), which in turn have been linked to enteropathogens transmitted to humans through meat consumption.
The case for irradiation
Finally, Maki endorses routine irradiation for certain meats, processed foods containing milk and egg products and selected vegetables which are eaten raw.
He wrote: “Research has shown that irradiation kills pathogens or markedly reduces pathogen counts without impairing the nutritional content value of food or making it toxic, carcinogenic or radioactive.”
However, despite the technology being approved as safe by the World Health Organization, the CDC, the FDA and the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Food among others, irradiation still faces strong opposition.
“I believe it is time to launch a major effort to gain public acceptance of irradiation of high-risk foods,” Maki wrote. “It is time to stop reliving history.”
Strengthening the system
Despite this, he suggests that there are parts of the US food safety system that are strong, like the government’s Pathogen Reduction, Hazard Analysis, and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program, FoodNet – a more intensive surveillance system of food-borne pathogens across ten states – and PulseNet, which analyzes DNA subtypes of various pathogens identified in labs across the US. However, he added: “The HACCP program needs to be scientifically validated and applied more consistently at all stages of food production – actions that might have prevented the current salmonella outbreak.”
In addition, he said that FoodNet should be centralized and applied nationwide, and PulseNet’s program should be integrated with similar programs in other countries.
Dr Dennis Maki is a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health and a hospital epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics.
Source: The New England Journal of Medicine
Vol. 360, Issue 10, pp. 949-953.
“Coming to Grips with Foodborne Infection – Peanut Butter, Peppers, and Nationwide Salmonella Outbreaks”
Author: D.G. Maki
