By Cat Holmes
University of Georgia
Mad cow disease has grabbed more headlines lately, but the
germs that cause foodborne illnesses have a much greater impact
on public health. Now a task force of U.S. scientists is
proposing new ways to tackle food safety.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that
each year foodborne illnesses make 76 million Americans sick,
put more than 300,000 in hospitals and kill 5,000 people.
An issue paper released by the Council for Agricultural Science
and Technology recommends new strategies to enhance food
safety, specifically food derived from animals.
“The bottom line is to come up with a strategic approach to
reduce the incidence of foodborne illness,” said Michael Doyle,
director of the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety
and chair of the CAST task force.
The task force is made up of scientists from around the United
States. They found that the best approach to the problem was
quantitative microbial risk assessment. Translation: a systems
approach in which each food source is examined from the farm to
your plate.
“The idea is to determine where in the system we would have the
greatest impact,” said Doyle, an international authority on
foodborne bacterial pathogens. “From a public health and
regulatory standpoint, we have limited resources, so the idea
is to find the points where we can intervene and most greatly
reduce the risk of human illness.”
For example, take the case of listeriosis, a serious infection
that mainly affects pregnant women, newborns and adults with
weakened immune systems. According to the CDC, 2,500 Americans
become seriously ill with listeriosis each year and 500 die.
Listeria is killed by pasteurization and cooking, but certain
ready-to-eat foods like hot dogs and deli meats can be
contaminated after cooking and before packaging.
“In this case, the greatest impact for reducing listeriosis
would be interventions in the meat processing plants,” Doyle
said.
However, in the case of Escherichia coli O157:H7, another
foodborne illness that infects 73,000 people and kills 61 each
year in the U.S., the place of greatest impact is most likely
the farm.
“Reducing E. coli O157:H7 carriage in cattle is likely to have
a greater impact on reducing human illness than relying on
cooking ground beef thoroughly,” Doyle said.
That’s because E. coli is transmitted not only through eating
undercooked, contaminated ground beef but also through cattle
manure on the farm and in water that may be used for drinking,
swimming or irrigation.
Keeping the pathogen out of the cattle will not only protect
the beef supply but also water, farms and produce.
The CAST paper addresses not only the safety of foods during
production but also food safety initiatives for consumers and
retailers.
The full text of the paper, “Intervention Strategies for the
Microbial Safety of Foods of Animal Origin,” (Issue paper No.
25) is on the CAST Web site (www.cast-science.org).
CAST is an international group of 38 scientific and
professional societies. It gathers, interprets and communicates
science-based information about food, fiber and natural
resources.
(Cat Holmes is a news editor for the University of Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
