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Food Safety
Research Consortium Expertise
Grows with
Addition of New Member
Washington, DC, September 12th, 2003 – The Food Safety Research Consortium (FSRC) welcomed the National Food Safety and Toxicology Center to its research partnership, which focuses on improving the U.S. food safety system and reducing foodborne illness.
The National Food Safety and Toxicology Center, founded in 1998 at Michigan State University, is the seventh organization to join the FSRC and will contribute additional expertise in toxicology and chemical risk assessment and on the mechanisms of pathogenicity and toxicity of organisms such as E. coli 0157:H7, Campylobacter, and Salmonella. The center’s director, Dr. Ewen C.D. Todd, is a member of the FSRC steering committee. Before heading the center, Dr. Todd was a research scientist at the Bureau of Microbial Hazards, Health Products and Food Branch, of Health Canada in Ottawa.
Created in February 2003, the FSRC is an interdisciplinary research collaboration to develop improved risk analysis and analytical tools for food safety decisionmaking, priority setting, and resource allocation. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that there are 76 million foodborne illnesses each year, with an associated 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, due to foodborne pathogens. The FSRC aims to reduce this public health burden by helping decisionmakers in government and the private sector make better use of their resources to reduce the risk of illness.
The National Food Safety and Toxicology Center complements the expertise from the other member organizations: Resources for the Future, a Washington-based think tank; Iowa State University’s Institute for Food Safety and Security; the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety; the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine; the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Massachusetts; and the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at the University of California at Davis.
Food
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