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Doyle writes: Physicians play key role in preventing foodborne illness

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Food safety awareness is key to understanding the food safety issues on the horizon, and clinicians at hospitals and doctors’ offices play a key role in ensuring consumers are aware of the threats of foodborne illness, said the University of Georgia’s Michael Doyle.

Mike-Doyle-31638-003-230x312In an opinion piece published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Doyle and his colleagues discuss the future for food safety and how it might relate to clinicians.

“Clinical infectious diseases are a part of society. Considering how prevalent foodborne illness is, many doctors are going to see patients with symptoms caused by foodborne pathogens. It’s good for them to be more grounded in not just treating the patient, but better at advising the patient in how to prevent foodborne illnesses through appropriate food handling practices,” said Doyle, a Regents Professor in the department of food science and technology in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and director of the Center for Food Safety.

Paper authors focused on clinicians because they tend to put more weight on treating illnesses rather than preventing them; however, education is key to keeping illnesses from occurring, they said. Clinicians will continue to play a major role in reducing foodborne illness by diagnosing and reporting cases and in helping to educate the consumer about food safety practices.

Doyle also pointed out that there are other more common ways to prevent foodborne illness in the home that he believes clinicians should make patients more aware of.

“When there’s a problem with a processed food, and a lot of people eat it and get sick because of contamination, that gets a lot of publicity,” Doyle said. “But a very small percentage of foodborne outbreaks is associated with processed foods.”

Most outbreaks occur because food has been mishandled during food service or in a home—through cross-contamination, temperature abuse or undercooking or when prepared by an ill food handler, he said.

When dealing with food safety practices, it is important, first, to recognize who is most susceptible to illness and, second, to identify the main causes of it.

Doyle and co-authors brought up several key points to consider when talking about food safety. The first is that “the U.S. is becoming an aging population,” Doyle explained, “and this population of older Americans is more susceptible to foodborne illnesses.”

Elderly individuals are more likely to experience severe complications if they come across foodborne diseases, and they may not bounce back from the illness easily.

The final two key points connect, and they are the dangers of imported foods coming into the U.S. from other countries and climate change causing problems within the U.S., driving some of the demand for imported foods.

“With the drought that we’re seeing in California, which has been our salad bowl for so long—they were providing 70 percent of leafy greens and a lot of other salad-type products—we’re going to see more and more of this produce coming from other regions of the world,” he said.

Additional study co-authors are Marilyn Erickson, Walid Alali, Jennifer Cannon, Xiangyu Deng, Ynes Ortega, Mary Alice Smith and Tong Zhao, all in the Center for Food Safety and the UGA department of food science.

The paper, “Food Industry’s Current and Future Role in Preventing Microbial Foodborne Illness within the United States,” is available at http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/03/29/cid.civ253.full.pdf+html.

Doyle writes: China can learn from US food safety net

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Mike Doyle, Regents Professor and director of the Center for Food Safety, University of Georgia, writes in China Daily today:

“The food-borne disease surveillance system in the United States has become so robust that it has detected hundreds of outbreaks in the past six years that previously would likely have gone unrecognized.

“This has resulted in many foods being newly identified as vehicles of illnesses. This increased awareness of weaknesses in the U.S. food safety net has by and large led to the Food Safety Modernization Act, which will raise the level of attention that food producers, processors, distributors and importers must give to ensuring their products are safe for human and animal consumption.

These new regulations will have direct relevance to the Chinese food industry, especially if foods or ingredients from China are exported to the U.S.. Also, many of the new rules, if applied in China, could enhance the overall safety of its food supply. …

“Although federal oversight of food processors is important, there is a fundamental principle that must be adopted by the entire food industry for a food safety net to be robust and effective. Everyone involved in the food continuum must be focused foremost on providing consumers with safe foods. Producers who are more motivated by economics and consider food safety to be secondary can undermine public confidence and the integrity of a country’s entire food system.

The approaches to enhancing the safety of the U.S. food supply are largely the result of decades of experience by food safety regulatory agencies and the food industry in mitigating the risk of food contamination.

With a national food safety program under development in China, the Chinese food industry and regulatory agencies could readily benefit from the U.S. experience in improving the safety of their foods by adopting and implementing similar practices and policies.

Doyle was ready to take FSIS job; finances got in the way

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U.S. President Obama has been big on the food safety rhetoric but short on actions.

Sounds familiar.

I don’t expect much from government – providing safe food is the responsibility of producers and everyone from farm-to-fork, government is there to set a minimal standard – so I’m rarely disappointed. Like I tell Amy, the lower you set your expectations of me, the less likely you are to be disappointed.

Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post reports this morning the Obama administration has had a difficult time filling the post of chief food safety official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it wasn’t until this week — one year into his term — that the president nominated someone to assume that role.

Elisabeth Hagen, 40, a physician with four years’ experience in food safety, was not the first choice. Most of her career has been spent teaching and practicing medicine as an infectious disease specialist. She left medicine in 2006 and went to the USDA, where she was quickly promoted through the ranks of the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to become the chief medical officer last year.

Layton reports that last February, the administration approached Mike Doyle, a nationally known microbiologist who directs the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. Doyle said he was offered the job and was vetted, but the day before the announcement was to be made in May, his nomination collapsed.

The White House wanted Doyle to divest his financial interest in a patented microbial wash for meat that he had developed. Doyle offered to defer his interests until his government service was completed but the administration refused, he said.

"It’s just an awful lot to ask for. I would have taken a more than 50 percent pay cut to go to Washington, and this would have been a very big financial hit."

The administration also sought out Caroline Smith Dewaal, the director of food safety at Center for Science in the Public Interest, but Dewaal’s nomination came to a halt in August because she was a registered lobbyist, which violated the administration’s policy against hiring lobbyists.

The Administration didn’t know that before?

Doyle did add this of Hagen:

"I don’t know of her personally. She’s got a steep learning curve."