One Health in food safety and security education: Subject matter outline for a curricular framework.

Educating students in the range of subjects encompassing food safety and security as approached from a One Health perspective requires consideration of a variety of different disciplines and the interrelationships among disciplines. The Western Institute for Food Safety and Security developed a subject matter outline to accompany a previously published One Health in food safety and security curricular framework. The subject matter covered in this outline encompasses a variety of topics and disciplines related to food safety and security including effects of food production on the environment. This subject matter outline should help guide curriculum development and education in One Health in food safety and security and provides useful information for educators, researchers, students, and public policy-makers facing the inherent challenges of maintaining and/or developing safe and secure food supplies without destroying Earth's natural resources

Risk Mitigating Strategies in the Food Supply Chain

Food safety events in the recent past have generated significant media attention and resulted in increased concerns over the food on the plate. A recent study (Degeneffe et al., 2007) on consumer perceptions of bio-terrorism and food safety risks shows increasing concern over food safety and corresponding decreasing confidence in security of the U.S. food supply. While there are some mandated safety and security practices for the firms in the food supply chain the economic incentives for the firms to actively address food safety throughout the supply chain are less clear. Security practices often require significant investments in both within the firm and across the supply chain but do not show tangible returns. Also, higher investments in securing the firms’ processes and products do not necessarily make the food products more safe if the supply chain partners exhibit higher risks. However, a risk that is realized can potentially bankrupt the firm. Some high-profile cases of food safety outbreaks have had substantial economic consequences such as, lost sales, recall and compensation costs, damaged goodwill and hence impact on future markets. Such incidents can lead the firms out of business and the impact is not contained just at the firm level but also felt throughout the food supply chain. The issues of economic incentives and disincentives for risk mitigation strategies and investments, in a highly vulnerable area such as food sector, are an emerging area of concern both in private and public sector management as well as academic research. The research questions of interest that this paper addresses are: How much should the firm invest to address the security and safety risks that it faces? The optimum investment levels, among other things, are a function of the probabilities of contamination levels exceeding the maximum acceptable standards set. We consider a specification for the contamination levels follow gamma distribution as it exhibits the fat tail property which suggests that extreme events are more likely than predicted by the normal Gaussian form. Previous work by Mohtadi and Murshid(2007) has highlighted the fat-tail nature of extreme events for chemical, biological and radionuclear (CBRn) attacks, which are of intentional nature. However, for food safety risks of unintentional nature the fat-tail nature of the distribution though suggested, is not yet established in literature. The present model leaves less scope for analytical solutions but lends itself to numerical methods, which we employ to examine the firm strategies. Our preliminary model and its analysis suggest that infact for very low levels of risk exposure no investment in security is required! However, as the standards loosen and risk increases the optimum amount of investments also increase. Though the result here are intuitively consistent, they are largely dependent on the parametric specification of the model and their sensitivity to the parameter values is yet to be tested.Agribusiness, Risk and Uncertainty, L100, L800,

A Meticulous Food Safety Plan Today Avoids Handcuffs Tomorrow

In August 2010, thousands of people across the United States were poisoned by eating eggs unknowingly tainted with Salmonella enteritidis bacteria. Following a lengthy investigation, the owners of the facility where the outbreak began were sentenced to three months in prison. This is not a one-off case; poor food safety practices are responsible for several outbreaks and often end in incarceration. Filthy hen houses, diseased fruit storage, and negligent food processing may be the last thing we want to imagine, but these practices have much to teach today\u27s food producers. This article first examines how poor food production practices can lead to an environment ripe for spread of disease and an unacceptable level of contamination. Then, it explores what companies can do to prevent such unacceptable conditions, decrease the likelihood and severity of an outbreak and, of course, avoid incarceration

Biological Terrorism, Emerging Diseases, and National Security

Examines the extent to which bioterrorist attacks have proven or may prove difficult to distinguish from outbreaks of emerging diseases. Makes recommendations for how the U.S. could better prepare to meet the threat of biological terrorism

How Should America's Anti-Terrorism Budget Be Allocated? Findings from a National Survey of Attitudes of U.S. Residents about Terrorism

U.S. residents are very concerned about future terrorist attacks and they are willing to commit substantial sums to prevent further terrorist acts. Protecting against another 9/11 style incident is important, but U.S. residents are more concerned about protecting the food supply system and preventing release of chemical or biological agents in public areas. On average respondents would allocate 13.3 percent more to protect the food supply chain and 12.0 percent more to protect against release of a toxic chemical or biological agent than they would to protect against another terrorist attack using hijacked aircraft. Approximately $5 billion is currently spent to protect civil aviation. The 2006 budget provided$8.6 billion of fiscal authority for programs protecting against all types of catastrophic terrorist incidents, including protection against radiological or nuclear incidents, as well as protecting the food supply and preventing chemical or biological attacks. No one would argue that decisions on the size and internal allocation of the nation's homeland security budget should be made on the basis of a public opinion survey, but this survey indicates that Americans would likely support additional spending to defend the food system and protect against release of a chemical or biological agent.Political Economy,

Food defense practices of school districts in northern U.S. states

This study assessed implementation of food defense practices in public schools in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The first phase involved a qualitative multi-site case study: one-day visits were made to five school districts in the states of Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. A principal, district foodservice director (FSD), two food production workers, and an emergency responder at each site were interviewed about food defense awareness and risk perception. Meal production and service were observed for implementation of food defense practices. In Phase Two 543 school food authorities or FSDs (36% percent of the population from 1,501 districts in seven Midwestern states) responded to an Internet-administered survey. Survey items included frequency of implementation of 31 food defense best practices adapted from the work of Yoon and Shanklin (2007a) and Yoon (2007). The survey included ten items assessing risk perception using Slovic\u27s psychometric paradigm (1987). Items requested information about crisis management and food defense planning, food defense training, influence over districts\u27 security policies, as well as operational and demographic characteristics. Four themes emerged from the 25 interviews conducted during the site visit: low awareness, lack of concern, food not considered a potential danger, and how conflicting priorities influence security. Food defense was an unfamiliar concept among most interviewees. Many expressed the belief that food tampering was not likely in their schools because employees were trustworthy or location was too insignificant. Principals expressed concern for physical security measures but did not perceive their contribution to food defense. In most districts, the FSD was not included in district emergency response planning activities and communication about food defense did not occur between principals, FSD, and emergency responders. Some of the interviewees had experience with food tampering incidents; seven incidents were reported, of which five had occurred in schools. Employees in a central kitchen facility were suspected in two of the school incidents, and three were perpetrated by students, indicating different sources of vulnerabilities. Most (67.8%) survey respondents reported district enrollment \u3c2,500 students. Few (14.5%) had implemented a food defense plan; implementation was related to FSD involvement in crisis management planning and to FSD receiving food defense training. Thirteen practices were implemented most of the time (mean \u3e4.0 on 5-point scale with 5 = always); most of these within control of FSD. Six practices were implemented less frequently (mean \u3c3.0 on 5-point scale with 1 = never); three would require administrative action to implement, and two were related to FSD communication with emergency responders. Mean values for unknown risk risk perception measures indicated some disagreement that intentional food contamination was a new risk for respondents and strong disagreement that they personally knew a lot about how terrorists could contaminate the food supply. The mean for the dread risk scale was 1.93 on a 4-point scale with 4 = high, similar to perceived risk of common everyday activities reported by Lee, LeMyre, and Krewski (2010). Compared to district administrators, FSDs perceived significantly greater personal control over both terrorism and food tampering risks

Developing systems to control food adulteration

The objective of this study is to explore the current strategies available to monitor and detect the economically and criminally motivated adulteration of food, identifying their strengths and weaknesses and recommend new approaches and policies to strengthen future capabilities to counter adulteration in a globalized food environment. Many techniques are used to detect the presence of adulterants. However, this approach relies on the adulterant, or means of substitution, being "known" and an analytical method being available. Further techniques verify provenance claims made about a food product e.g. breed, variety etc. as well as the original geographic location of food production. These consider wholeness, or not, of a food item and so do not need to necessarily identify the actual adulterant just whether the food is complete. The conceptual framework developed in this research focuses on the process of predicting, reacting and detecting economically and criminally motivated food adulteratio