BEWARE TAINTED FOODS
Thu, 08/11/2016 - 12:00am
Every year 600 million – approximately one in ten – individuals get sick as a result of consuming tainted foods.
Dr. Leonard Williams, Director of Post Harvest Technologies at the North Carolina A&T State University in the United States, referred to these statistics as he contended that it would be in the best interest of countries not to ignore them. He reinforced the point as he noted that according to the World Health Organisation, 420 000 people, including 125 000 children, die from food-borne illnesses annually. He made the comments yesterday morning during the Post Barbados Food Law and Industry Conference Workshop and Seminars held in the Meeting Room of the Frank Collymore Hall, as he spoke on the topic “Food Safety Modernisation Act (FSMA) and its impact on the Food Industry in the Caribbean and Global Community”.
The FSMA, he said, which was signed into law in 2011 in the United States, is aimed at ensuring that the food supply in that country is safe, by shifting the focus from responding to contamination to preventing it. Through this law, he added, countries in the Caribbean which import food products from the US, can rest assured that the products are safe for consumption as added checks and balances have been introduced into the system to ensure that foods are always of the optimum quality.
“Foods can be contaminated at any point; we understand that our food travels now more than we do. At any given time from the farms to the table, our foods can go from the farms to processing, sorting, handling, which means it’s been through numerous hands; to the packing truck; to the chill truck; off that truck, back to a loading dock, where it can be resorted or repackaged depending on the vendors or the co-packers, and then it can be packed back onto the truck and shipped all over the world via planes, trains, cars, boats you name it,” he stated.
As such, Dr. Williams maintained it is important that we understand how our foods are traced throughout the food system, as this is key to helping reduce the risk of food-borne pathogens. He believes strongly that the development of a robust traceability programme will ensure that the population, especially the older individuals, are not put at risk.
“This requires not just developing a systematic approach, but giving our consumers choices, especially when we are talking about internationally imported or exported foods or goods, because our consumers expect the same safety from domestically grown produce, as from an internationally grown product,” he stated. (JRT)