Food safety is a global concern

With the cold war over, the US is now focusing on terrorism as its major threat to national security. Marc Ostfield, senior advisor for bioterrorism, biodefence and health security at the US Department of State told the recent Institute of Food Technologists Global Food Safety and Quality Conference that the safety of the national food supply could present a "soft target for terrorists". The interconnected global food supply web offers opportunities for the deliberate contamination of food with biological, chemical or radiological agents.

Ostfeld noted progress in 2004 to mandate food-supply protection among the wealthy G8 nations. In 2005, G8 countries were introduced to the latest US techniques for assessing a company's vulnerability to intentional contamination, a system called CARVER + Shock. A computerised version of this tool has just been released and is available on the FDA's website.

The risk assessment follows the acronym CARVER, which stands for six attributes that are used to evaluate targets for an attack:

• Criticality: What impact would an attack have on public health and the economy?
• Accessibility: How easily can a terrorist access a target?
• Recuperability: How well could a system recover from an attack?
• Vulnerability: How easily could an attack be accomplished?
• Effect: What would be the direct loss from an attack, as measured by loss in production?
• Recognisability: How easily could a terrorist identify a target?

The CARVER tool also evaluates a seventh attribute - the psychological impacts of an attack or 'shock' attributes of a target. For example, the psychological impact tends to be greater if there is a large number of deaths involved or if the target has historical or cultural significance.

But a bigger risk is...

In global terms however, the risks of injury, disease and death from terrorist-inspired contamination of food pales into insignificance when compared to the already present risks of viral, mycotoxin, parasitic and bacterial contamination.

At the 14th Australian HACCP Conference held this month, Dr Nanju Alice Lee from the University of NSW said that it is estimated that 25% of all food is contaminated with mycotoxins (fungal metabolites) and this results in more than 20,000 deaths annually in Indonesia alone. In the US, mycotoxins result in a $1.6 billion loss in the cereal industry each year.

Mycotoxins exhibit a range of health effects including carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, tetratogenicity, toxicity, nephrotoxicity, hepatoxicity and immunosuppressive. This is a current and known global threat to health and safety and yet there are no harmonised global regulations covering the spectrum of mycotoxins.

The implementation of management and enforcement of regulatory limits are impeded by many factors well outside the scope of science and technology. Some of the factors include food security issues, regulatory infrastructure, supply chain structure, marketing patterns, trade relationships and cultural and socioeconomic issues. According to Dr Lee, this predicament is much more complex in developing countries.

For international trade, many countries follow the CODEX recommended regulatory limits - this essentially means that the developed countries import the high quality, low mycotoxin produce leaving the more contaminated produce for consumption in the less developed, less affluent country. From a global citizen perspective, this is a very unsatisfactory outcome.

Perhaps if we want to look at food safety from a world perspective we should be considering mycotoxin regulation and global harmonisation rather than terrorist threats.