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New Food Agency Consortium to Rank Public Health Impact of Food Hazards
February 3, 2003
Some of the top minds in food safety are joining forces, and on Feb. 6 they will
announce their mission: to rank the public health impact of food hazards. The
ultimate goal of this effort, called the Food Safety Research Consortium, is to reduce the
incidence of foodborne illness. How? By helping policy makers, food producers and
others set priorities and allocate resources based on the biggest risks.
While the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has estimates of the number of foodborne illnesses caused by specific pathogens such as E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Listeria, for example, the risk-ranking project will be the first systematic look at which pathogens in combination with what foods pose the greatest threat.
But that's only part of it. The consortium will also evaluate economic impact and social factors, plus ways to prioritize risk reduction (taking into account feasibility, cost and effectiveness of interventions) and allocate resources (taking into account current laws and other public policy priorities).
"The experience all of us have had in government is that it's way more than a full time job to manage what's in front of us on a day-to-day basis," Michael Taylor, senior fellow at Resources for the Future, the think tank that is administering the consortium, told Food Chemical News. "It's virtually impossible to step back in a larger-picture way and allocate resources in fundamentally different ways to make the system work better." And that, says Taylor, is the need being filled by the consortium.
"We're not going to come up with policy advice to tell decision makers how they should go about their business," Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety, told FCN. "We're going to provide science-based information that they can use in their decision making."
As an example, Doyle rattled off CDC's foodborne disease estimates for various pathogens, including Vibrio vulnificus, a bacteria associated with raw or undercooked shellfish which causes about 50 cases of foodborne illness and 18 deaths annually. "I've heard some consumer groups say that we need to do a lot about Vibrio vulnificus," Doyle said. It does cause a "devastating disease," he added, "but from a public health impact, do we want to put a lot of resources on Vibrio versus Campylobacter or Listeria? I'm not saying it's right or wrong at this point, but this is the complexity of the issue we have right now."
The group's steering committee and expert panel reads like a who's who in food safety, with a cross section of expertise, and a dose of participants from the previous administration. Taylor, a former top-ranking official at both USDA and FDA, and Margaret Glavin, who most recently served as administrator of FSIS, and is now a visiting scholar at RFF, will supervise the consortium. They will be joined by Doyle; Catherine Wotecki, a former USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety and now dean of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University; J. Glenn Morris of the University of Maryland Medical School; Julie Caswell of the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Massachusetts and Jerry Gillespie of the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at the University of California at Davis.
Members of the expert panel are Richard Guerrant, University of Virginia School of Medicine; Richard Merrill, University of Virginia School of Law; Sanford Miller, Center for Food and Nutrition Policy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Joseph Rodricks, Environ Corporation.
The risk-ranking project, which is being funded by a $346,204 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will result in an interactive software package in which users can figure out the relative importance of hazards, plus their cause and effect. The data will be continually updated, and its limitations and gaps clearly identified. The format, which will ultimately be available via the Internet, will also allow users to plug in other assumptions or parameters to come up with different risk rankings. A basic model, which should be in place by the end of 2003, will eventually not only include microbial pathogens, but also chemical contaminants and intentional threats, such as bioterrorism.
"Everybody has said for years - especially the National Academy of Sciences - that we need a risk-based system," said Carol Tucker Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, who was briefed on the project. "They've got the brains, they've got the resources. I hope it will make a major contribution."
The Food Safety Research Consortium will hold a public briefing on Thurs. Feb. 6 at 1:30 p.m. to discuss the details of its project. It will be held in the first floor conference center at Resources for the Future, 1616 P St. NW. For information, call Jody Tick at 202-939-3420.
--Carole Sugarman
Food Chemical News
February 3, 2003
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