Safety risks rise with global sourcing and EU’s over-65s

Older people, in particular, tend to consume more products such as sandwiches and pâtés, which can be the source of dangerous pathogens, such as listeria, especially if stored beyond their shelf-life. Because older people dislike waste, "they are more likely to use leftovers in the meals", reported Alec Kyriakides.

"But it is not just a factor for the over-65s. If you look at every group and the millions of servings per year and if you look at 'using up' as a motivator that is a risk," he said.

At Food Manufacture's emerging food safety issues conference in London last month, Kyriakides said that globalisation of sourcing in the food supply chain combined with changes to agricultural practice and progressive industrialisation around the world were also likely to create new food safety threats.

"Globalisation has created the opportunity to spread disease and we have started to see the development of resistance," he said. "The real disease drivers are agricultural shifts, industrial shifts and sourcing and supply chains."

The event, sponsored by Kimberley-Clark, Eversheds and 3M Health Care, highlighted the new focus of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in risk assessment and Food Standards Agency (FSA) in managing new food safety risks.

Both EFSA and FSA are looking at new strategies that improve their response to emerging safety risks and to target their limited resources more effectively.

By 2050 about 30% of the EU population will be over 65 years old compared with just 16% today. Dr Tobin Robinson, EFSA's head of unit for emerging risks, said: "This has a significant impact on our risk assessment as people tend to be a lot more susceptible [as they get older] to a lot of the hazards we are already more familiar with."

Kyriakides cited the rise in foodborne diseases such as listeriosis, which are closely linked to the introduction of chilled foods, as an example of emerging risks. "The changes that drove listeriosis were the social/lifestyle change together with the food trend which allowed microbial collection to occur and that will undoubtedly continue to happen," he said.

He presented figures showing how the industry had prevented a potentially huge rise in incidents of listeriosis since 1985. "We've avoided 3,000 cases of listeriosis by the measures that have been put in place by the industry."