Food safety focus: We’ve got
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High-profile food safety issues, such as the recent case of dioxin contamination of imported pasteurised liquid eggs or the impending EU ban on the use of the chemical bisphenol A in polycarbonate baby bottles, often grab the biggest headlines. But when it comes to the biggest risks of contracting foodborne illness, the problems tend to be far more basic.

It all comes down to having good food hygiene practices and appropriate critical control points along the supply chain or not, as the case may be. Often pejoratively considered to be the province of the so-called 'mop and bucket' brigade, the avoidance of microbial cross-contamination is usually the name of the game.

With the notable exception of a few rogue operators bent on illegally cutting corners and/or costs, most legitimate food processors have raised their hygiene game over the past 30 or so years and now have a pretty good food safety record. The trouble is that changing lifestyles and consumption patterns among the population could be exacerbating some worrying rises in cases of illness from bacteria such as campylobacter and listeria (especially among vulnerable groups), and viruses such as norovirus.

While not all of these are within the processing industry's ability to control, the sector has to constantly demonstrate to regulators and the public that it is doing everything possible to minimise food safety threats that fall within its remit.

In response to the new food safety challenges that are emerging, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has revised its strategy to focus more on areas such as reducing the contamination of poultry (mainly chickens) with campylobacter throughout the supply chain, from farm to plate, as well as addressing the listeriosis risk, which has risen with the growth in consumption of chilled foods.

Targeted inspections​

Rather than spreading their increasingly limited food hygiene enforcement resources ever thinly across the board, the FSA and local environmental health departments will increasingly make use of sophisticated computer database systems and market intelligence to focus their activities on potential rogue operators and other high risk areas.

So, whether it is butchers such as John Tudor & Sons of Bridgend whose appalling food safety culture and practices led to the catastrophic outbreak of E.coli O157 in South Wales in 2005 or criminally inclined importers of contaminated food and feed from far flung parts of the world, they can expect to be in the spotlight in future.

Because of the way in which trade has developed globally in recent years, incidents such as the 2008 Chinese melamine in milk scandal and more recent cases of dioxins in eggs and pigs due to contaminated animal feed, have the potential to affect huge numbers of people across the world very quickly. For this reason the Parma-based European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) is also implementing new strategies and systems to help respond to emerging food safety risks and target its resources more effectively.

"A lot of risks are coming from importing [ingredients] from outside Europe," EFSA's head of unit for emerging risks, Dr Tobin Robinson, said at Food Manufacture's emerging food safety conference in London last year. "But Europe also has a history of exporting things to the rest of the world."

Risk-based approach​

Most experts in the field recognise that risk-based inspection is the way forward, especially given the financial problems facing the public sector at the moment.

While it will never be possible to completely eradicate risk in the food supply chain, putting the emphasis on reducing risk at source by, for example, improving on-farm animal food and feed hygiene to prevent contamination in the first place, and directing enforcement action where it is most needed, should pay dividends.

For those companies with third-party food hygiene certification, through schemes such as the British Retail Consortium Global Standard and the FSSC 22000 food safety management scheme, the FSA has indicated that it may, in future, encourage inspectors to take such accreditation into account when setting priorities for their activities under a process known as 'earned autonomy'.

But, Britain's abattoirs and primary cutting plants will have to wait a few years before they can enjoy any such move as it will require changes to EU law. Despite pressure for change from the UK and other Member States, EU-wide regulatory change faces resistance from some vested interests across Europe.

Meanwhile, the meat industry is up in arms at the FSA's attempts to transfer the costs of today's prescriptive inspection regime on to its shoulders. Various bodies, including the British Meat Processors Association and the National Farmers' Union, have written a joint letter to Caroline Spelman, secretary of state at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, expressing their concern at the extra £32M burden that full cost recovery would place on their fragile sector and urged her to review these proposals. Given the financial hole the government is in, it is unlikely they will receive much joy from Spelman.

But it is not just with regard to changes to charges for official controls on abattoirs where concerns have been expressed. Jenny Morris, principal policy officer at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, which represents local environmental health officers, has raised the spectre that the swingeing cuts to local authority budgets risked creating another serious foodborne disease outbreak on a par with the South Wales E.coli O157 incident if local hygiene inspection became further under-resourced.

However, Sainsbury's chief microbiologist, Alec Kyriakides, has dismissed such fears. At Food Manufacture's emerging food safety conference, he argued that there were probably efficiency savings to be won in public sector food hygiene inspections without jeopardising food safety. Both Morris and Kyriakides sit on the Advisory Committee for the Microbiological Safety of Food, which advises the FSA.

Another concern relates to question marks that have been raised over the future of LG Regulation, formerly LACORS: the Local Authorities Coordinators of Regulatory Services, which may cease to exist from March under government public sector cost-cutting plans. Were this to happen, industry is concerned that this would reduce the advice and guidance available on the enforcement of food legislation, where consensus currently exists between local authorities and industry.

The FSA wants all food businesses to strive to achieve the very best food hygiene standards. These are the companies that have inculcated a culture of food safety throughout their businesses from Boardroom to the shop floor. The FSA is hoping to identify the problem through the study it commissioned last year: an evidence review on regulation cultures and behaviours. This work, which is ongoing, is examining what exactly encourages and lies behind such food safety cultures when they are found to exist so that lessons learned can be shared with others.

Given the continuing financial constraints under which the FSA now has to operate, it will have no option going forward but to work closely with the industry to achieve its goal of reducing foodborne illness in the UK. As chief executive Tim Smith told Food Manufacture's conference: "I see our role as working with industry and working with consumers."

Warning: Viruses may be lurking ...

Foodborne illness from shellfish, fresh produce and ready-to-eat foods contaminated with viruses such as norovirus could be far more common than is generally recognised, claims an expert in the field.

According to Dr Erwin Duizer, head of the enteric viruses section at the Department of Virology of the Centre for Infectious Diseases Control in The Netherlands (RIVM), recent insights indicate that while norovirus and hepatitis A virus are probably the main viruses of concern in foodstuffs, they are not the only ones that can be transmitted by food.

The problem, warns Duizer, is that foodborne viruses are quite resistant to common food production processes and enormous reductions in viral numbers are needed to render contaminated food safe as infectious doses are generally quite low.

"We estimate that 3050% of shellfish is contaminated with norovirus," Duizer claimed at last November's European Federation of Food Science and Technology annual meeting in Dublin. While heat treatment at 90°C for 90 seconds and high pressure processing (500Mpa for five minutes) is effective at killing off viruses, the high incidence of contamination raises serious concerns for the consumption of raw shellfish, such as oysters, he warned.