@Risk

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) released a report from the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), which recommends clear objectives be set to improve the ability of government and industry to trace food products throughout all stages of the supply chain.

As I have posted about before (see here and here, for example), food can become contaminated at any of the many different steps in the supply chain. Improved tracing could help: (more…)

Could increased stress on farm animals translate into increased food safety risks?

A study published last month in the journal “Foodborne Pathogens and Disease” suggests that it can.

Marcos H. Rostagno, an animal scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), published the review titled, “Can Stress in Farm Animals Increase Food Safety Risk,” and he identified ways that animal stress may be related to the prevalence of foodborne pathogens today.

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Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a comprehensive food-safety bill that could affect virtually every aspect of the nation’s food supply chain. The 159-page Food Safety Enhancement Act represents the first major changes to food safety laws in 70 years and would significantly boost the Food and Drug Administration’s authority to regulate how food is grown, harvested, and processed.

The Senate is expected to vote on its version of food-safety legislation this fall.

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The recall of Nestle Toll House refrigerated cookie dough last Friday underscored two important points regarding the safety of the nation’s food supply and the complexity of supply chain risk management. First, it appears that no one food is more, or less, risky than another. Second, consumers often don’t, or can’t, follow the food safety instructions found on the packaging label.

Nestle USA issued the recall late last week after health officials linked the cookie dough to a national outbreak of illness from the bacteria E.coli 0157. As many as 65 people in 29 states have been sickened. 25 have been hospitalized. But, what’s truly puzzling investigators here is that E.coli 0157 lives in the intestines of cattle –meaning that outbreaks are typically associated with contaminated meat. How could this particular bacteria, E.coli 0157, have ended up in refrigerated cookie dough? (more…)

Chicken Pot Pie Salmonella

An article on the front-page of the New York Times last month described the difficulty that industrial food giant ConAgra encountered tracing the source for repeated salmonella bacteria contamination of their Banquet Pot Pies products that sickened 15,000 consumers in 2007.

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