Food safety body plans national facility to control contamination

The Food Safety Authority is drafting plans to set up a "reference laboratory" to identify food poisoning microbes, rather than have them sent to Britain, which causes inevitable delays.

The facility will be able to "type" the exact strain of germ responsible; enable quicker identification of food-poisoning sources and cases to be linked; and so reduce the extent of illness, according to the FSA chief executive, Dr Patrick Wall.

Unprecedented outbreaks of salmonella poisoning this month have also led to the FSA accelerating its evaluation of the electronic early-warning system which should be adopted in this country.

Both moves come as the extent of illness caused by seven major outbreaks was confirmed: some 340 people have become ill, 48 of whom were hospitalised.

The proposals will feature in a strategic plan for the FSA being drawn up after the coming into law of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland Bill, 1998. It goes before Government within weeks.

Meanwhile, the new national centre for communicable disease will be a separate entity.

To be based at Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital, Dublin, it will monitor diseases with a view to a more effective public health response.

It was prompted by the need for improved monitoring of meningitis and other childhood diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella.

But it will play a significant role in tracking food-borne illness, Dr Wall said. The post of centre director will be advertised this week.

What is known as an enteric reference laboratory is considered essential for effective food-borne disease control. With specimens having to go to Britain, it can lead to delays in withdrawal of infective food products or the temporary closure of food premises. With many of the recent outbreaks, it has meant that health authorities still do not know the exact strain responsible and its source, although it may be weeks after the bug originally manifested itself.

The options were to develop existing facilities or establish a new stand-alone facility, he said. A separate meningitis reference laboratory will be at Temple Street Hospital.

The Department of Agriculture has important laboratory facilities already in Abbotstown, Co Dublin, while University College Hospital, Galway, has built up a typing facility where many specimens are evaluated before going to the UK. Equally, NUI Cork has good laboratory capacity at its faculty of food science, he said.

"It is very important for the food industry, and those in public health, to know what bugs we should be worrying about. We also need to know if, for example, particular bugs are prevalent in pigs, turkeys or whatever, to ensure control measures work," Dr Wall said.

Veterinary specialists would supply microbes isolated from animals, and with those from food sources they would form a databank, he said. With a food poisoning outbreak, the bug responsible could be identified almost immediately.

The FSA is undertaking a pilot study of the effectiveness of the US-developed PHLIS system for electronically collecting data on food poisoning. Laboratories at Waterford Regional Hospital and Cork University Hospital are electronically linked to public health departments operated by their health boards, which are in turn linked to the FSA in Dublin. Staff at the hospitals have been sent to the US Centre for Disease Control, Atlanta, for training. The UK system, known as CONSERV, is also being evaluated.

These systems of electronic linking are another essential in the effective control of food-borne illness. In the event of all hospital, public health and veterinary laboratories being linked, it would become obvious very quickly if a particular salmonella problem arose. It was some time before it became clear that many of the recent outbreaks were linked to eggs, and circumstantial evidence emerged that they were from the North, he noted.

The recent outbreaks, Dr Wall said, underlined the need for all forms of food retailer to know their suppliers.