By Ravi Jadeja, FAPC Food Safety Specialist

(STILLWATER, Okla. – May 2, 2016) We have been fortunate to have an abundant food supply that is provided by a network of food producers, processor and retailers. Despite technological advancements with the food chain, the Centers for Disease Control estimates foodborne illnesses affect one in six Americans annually.

The U.S. food industry has undergone many changes during the last several decades that have significantly improved the microbiological safety of its products.

Generally, food producers and processors comply with regulatory food standards and recommended food-safety practices, but their degree of commitment to promoting a strong food-safety culture varies. Compliance often depends on a company’s culture and the willingness of the senior management to absorb the additional costs.

Currently, the first two approaches are used to gauge the progress of the industry’s food-safety programs. Approach one is monitoring the occurrence of foodborne diseases in the population, and the second approach is product testing. Both of these current food-safety measures are reactive in nature and are not effective in preventing foodborne illnesses.

In order to effectively control foodborne illnesses, a food-safety system that utilizes a proactive approach to predict where problems might arise, rather than detecting them after they have occurred, is required. As part of these continuous improvement efforts, the Food Safety Modernization Act was signed into law in January 2011, but implementation currently awaits adoption of specific regulations.

When fully implemented, the food industry will be required to apply science- and risk-based preventive measures at all appropriate points across the farm-to-table spectrum to ensure the safety of foods. This new food-safety system will undoubtedly have some unanticipated weak links during its early stages of implementation. However, over the long term, this new and improved food-safety system should lead to a safer food supply and, in turn, to a reduced burden of foodborne illnesses.

Inherent to the implementation of FSMA and its science-based food-safety programs is the acknowledgment there will still be some level of risk of acquiring foodborne illness from eating food because zero risk is not practical.

Quantitative microbial risk assessment can help define the level of acceptable risk and the associated performance and microbiological standards. Using QMRA, the actual risk to public health is related to the levels of a microbiological hazard ingested through food at consumption, and those levels are in turn dependent on the initial contamination levels and modifying influences during processing and distribution.

However, the data needed for QMRA is not always available or in the correct format. Therefore, there is a need for epidemiologic studies and surveillance programs to fill the gap where data for these models are not available, as well as to provide an independent assessment of the sources of illnesses.

As new information becomes available, microbiological and performance standards should change to align with the state of the science knowledge of the food system. Collection of environmental and finished product-testing data should continue and possibly be enhanced to identify weaknesses that may occur post FSMA implementation.

Assessment of progress means fewer illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths, which requires robust human surveillance systems for sporadic illnesses and outbreaks that supply data needed to estimate the incidence of illness caused by each pathogen and the exposures that result from those infections.

With the introduction of the food-safety regulation, FSMA has initiated a transformation that should significantly improve safety of our food in the future. Despite these efforts, factors such as pathogen evolution, an increase in the elderly and immunocompromised populations, and unsafe food-handling practices by consumers could lead to increased foodborne illnesses and offset the progress the food industry continues to make toward mitigating foodborne-pathogen contamination in its products.

Improvements to the microbiological safety of our foods will require the collaborative efforts of the food industry, government and consumers to reduce foodborne illnesses.