By Jack Hayes
ATLANTA - Restaurateurs who implement and monitor diligent food safety training programs and continue to educate and motivate their employees in that area are fighting important battles in the escalating war against food-borne illness.
That was the view expressed here by food scientists at the International Food Safety and Quality Conference, a technical symposium of experts and professionals from academia, government and the food industry's export, import, manufacturing, processing, testing and consulting fields.
Presented by the Institute of Food Technologists, the food safety gathering in Atlanta preceded the fourth annual Food Safety Summit that will be held March 13-15 in Washington, D.C., under the sponsorship of the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation and the National Food Processors Association.
"Food-borne illness really is the most preventable of diseases, because 99 of the time it involves some human error, mostly due to not knowing," said Douglas Archer, food science and human nutrition professor at the University of Florida.
Archer was one of 21 scientists in a yearlong Institute of Food Technologies project that produced the IFT's 107-page report, "Emerging Microbial Food Safety Issues : Implications for Control in the 21st Century." Using that report as a focal point for the Atlanta conference, the IFT brought the science panel together to showcase the just-completed study as purportedly the most comprehensive research document yet released on the overall food safety problem.
"We're looking beyond farm-to-table toward a broad notion of environment-to-person food safety that takes in all of the factors," said conference attendee Scott Brooks, senior food safety manager to Taco Bell Corp. He was echoing remarks by conference keynote speaker Jerry Gillespie, director of the Joint Institute for Food Safety Research of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services.
Brooks was one of five presenters in a session exploring the impact of microbial testing, scientific purchase specifications and improved agricultural practices aimed at the safe delivery of produce.
"We have a lot better understanding now of the state of food safety for fresh and fresh-cut-produce," Brooks said.
The IFT document assembles a number of starting food safety facts and conclusions that were confirmed by the science panel. Among them was evidence that approximately 200 known diseases are spread through food, and that half of all recognized food-borne illness outbreaks have unknown causes.
The document uses the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that food-borne pathogens cause approximately 76 million illness, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths each year in the United Stats.
"We don't have a defined endpoint for this battle," said IFT panel chairman Morris Potter, lead scientist for epidemiology at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. "Yet we're not losing the battle either," he added.
The IFT report calls for regulatory agencies to work with public health officials, industry groups and consumers to set food safety objectives by targeting maximum hazard levels for potential illness, thus guiding food manufacturers and handlers whose charge is to maintain food at safe levels.
Responding to an attendee's question about the role of restaurants in advancing food safety, members of the science panel gave the foodservice industry positive marks for its proactive stance regarding staff training. Yet the panelists' evaluation of the restaurant industry's progress to date was more mixed.
"In large part the industry is doing better, but some people haven't gotten all the messages," Potter said. "There are issues of knowledge, awareness and motivation."
