The Government should establish a task force with responsibility for food safety education to reduce the threat from increasing and often potentially fatal cases of food-borne illness, a medical conference in Dublin has been told.
Food microbiologist Dr Mary Upton of UCD said food safety must include a stronger education element, including programmes for children at primary school level. There was an urgent need for pro-active and preventative strategies rather than the usual reactive responses after a food poisoning outbreak occurred.
She told the Biomedica conference in the RDS that microbial threats to the population were not spontaneous, so it was important to identify the conditions which contributed to the emergence of new food pathogens. "Stressing" but not killing microbes may lead to more resistant strains, Dr Upton warned.
Notwithstanding the setting up of the Food Safety Authority, she said a task force with responsibility for food safety education was needed. Military terms could be applied, she said, such as: "War is the last resort and represents the failure of diplomats to predict and prevent a crisis."
The education strategy needed to establish who teaches the "average consumer", but the safety message had to go out to everybody handling food, including producer, processor, caterer, transporter, retailer and wholesaler. They should help to make up the task force with food scientists, industry representatives, teachers, regulators and public relations advisers.
People accepted high levels of risk in many aspects of their lives, yet expect "zero risk" in others, she said. With food, zero risk did not exist, a concept which must be communicated to the public. Microbes were ubiquitous but could be killed, controlled or removed. The chief executive of the Food Safety Authority, Dr Pat Wall, said legislation to empower the new agency was expected to go before the ail and Senate Oireachtas before the summer recess, with its powers to be phased in from January. Once the Bill was finalised, the author ity's roles and responsibilities would be defined. Its overriding aim, however, was protection of public health in relation to food.
Information, education and communication would be an important element in its work, he said, while the authority would demand high standards, which would be spelt out in "model service agreements" applying to all sectors of the food chain.
He added: "In the best controlled systems, things can go wrong, so we must have structures in place throughout Ireland that can identify problems early and deal with them appropriately."
