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Making Our Food Safer: New research group to help improve U.S. food safety system and reduce foodborne disease
Six leading research institutions join to develop improved risk analysis and priority-setting tools for food safety decision-making
WASHINGTON, D.C., February 6, 2003 – Foodborne illness in the United States kills an estimated 5,000 people a year, and accounts for as many as 325,000 hospitalizations, yet the analytical and decision tools needed to combat this public health problem most effectively do not exist, say the founders of a new food safety research group. To address this problem, six leading food safety research institutions have formed the Food Safety Research Consortium (FSRC) to develop improved risk analysis and analytical tools for food safety decision-making, priority setting, and resource allocation
The consortium’s founding institutions are Iowa State University’s Institute for Food Safety and Security; Resources for the Future (RFF), a Washington-based think tank; 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.
“In today’s dynamic and global food system, foodborne disease remains a persistent, complex, and rapidly evolving public health problem,” said Michael R. Taylor, a senior fellow at RFF. “We understand the difficult challenge our food safety regulators face and want to develop practical tools they can use to help meet that challenge.”
“Setting priorities for reducing foodborne disease will require the best efforts of experts from many disciplines and institutions,” said Dr. Catherine Woteki, Dean of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University. “The Food Safety Research Consortium provides a vehicle for these experts and individuals in government, industry and the consumer community to work together to improve food safety in the United States.”
“Reducing foodborne disease requires a system-wide, holistic approach to detecting and preventing food safety problems,” said Professor Michael Doyle, Director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety . “The consortium brings together the breadth of expertise and perspective required to develop new, science-driven strategies for food safety.”
The FSRC’s first project will be to develop an integrated model for comparing and ranking the public health impacts of specific pathogen-food combinations. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have made estimates of the number of foodborne illnesses caused by specific pathogens such as E. coli 0157:H7, Salmonella, and Listeria, the Consortium’s new risk ranking project is the first systematic effort to determine which pathogens in combination with what foods have the greatest public health impact.
“We know vastly more about the incidence and causes of foodborne disease than we did just a few years ago,” said Dr. J. Glenn Morris of the University of Maryland Medical School, principal investigator on the risk ranking project. “We can now put this knowledge to use in determining where best to focus research, regulation and education to reduce the risk of illness.”
The FSRC risk ranking project will produce an interactive software package that government managers, food producers, and others interested in food safety can use to assess the relative importance of specific hazards as new data emerge and assumptions about cause and effect become more refined. The risk-ranking project is funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), a national philanthropy founded in 1972 that today is the largest US foundation devoted to improving the health and health care of all Americans.
“Food safety is an important population health issue,” said Dr. Pamela Russo, Senior Program Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The risk ranking project being undertaken by the Food Safety Research Consortium is a good first step toward better understanding the problem and better protecting the health of all our citizens.”
While ranking risks is an important first step in improving how resources are used, the next and more critical step is prioritizing opportunities to reduce the risk, taking into account the feasibility, cost, and effectiveness of possible government interventions and possible collaborations between government and the private sector. The decision tools for prioritizing risk reduction opportunities on the basis of risk analysis and assessments of the relative cost effectiveness of possible interventions are generally lacking. The long-range goal of the new consortium is to help fill this analytical vacuum.
The FSRC will be administered by RFF under the supervision of RFF Senior Fellow Michael R. Taylor and Visiting Scholar Margaret Glavin. FSRC will emphasize the widest possible interaction with food safety experts from both natural and social science disciplines and with other food safety stakeholders throughout the public and private sectors, including government, industry, academia, and the public interest community. Dr. Julie Caswell, University of Massachusetts, and Dr. Jerry Gillespie, University of California at Davis serve on the consortium’s Steering Committee with Dr. Doyle, Dr. Morris, Mr. Taylor, and Dr. Woteki. To help guide its research program, the FSRC has formed an Expert Panel whose members are Dr. Richard Guerrant, University of Virginia School of Medicine; Dr. Joseph Rodricks, Environ Corporation; Dr. Sanford A. Miller, the Center for Food and Nutrition Policy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; and Mr. Richard Merrill, University of Virginia School of Law.
The Consortium grew out of a conference on food safety priority setting held by Resources for the Future (RFF) in May 2001, and a meeting of interested experts and stakeholders convened jointly in July 2002 by RFF and the Milbank Memorial Fund, an operating foundation based in New York that has worked with RFF and its university partners on the development of the FSRC.
“Food safety is an important and challenging problem and a major new priority area for RFF,” said Paul Portney, President of RFF. “We look forward to combining RFF’s strengths in risk analysis and the social sciences with the outstanding expertise of our partner institutions in public health and the natural sciences; and we appreciate the support of the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, without which the consortium initiative would not have been possible.”
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