Chapter 1 Course Introduction by Dr Tang在线视频

Chapter 1. Case show and course introduction by Dr. Tang

Hello, Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to our new course-Science-based Food Safety Supervision. My name is Shuze Tang, the PI of this course. In this first lecture, I would like to give a brief introduction about this course. What would be involved in this course and who will teach this course, and what kind of references we will give you to follow.

First, I would like to give two cases for you to discuss. The first one is that a customer claimed that he felt very serious illness after he consumed the sandwich purchased from a supermarket. He asked for the legal responsibility, that means he asked for money compensation. The supermarket manager thought it would be food poisonous issue, so he gave this customer compensate. That means he gave some money to this customer.

For this case, my question is that should the supermarket be responsible for this issue? I think no, but why? The second question is that was this food poisoning issue? General say yes, but actually no, why? Was this a food safety issue? And we general say yes, but actually also no, why? So the answer is different from the general sense, so which one is correct? We have to determine it based on science. So this is the first example. The second example is the that the news media in April 2004 released that r that babies in Anhui province suffered very serious from the milk powder, the formulated milk powder consumed long term. Of those suffers, 177 babies hospitalized and 12 dead.

So now my question for the case is that was this again a food poisoning issue? Many newspapers said yes. But actually no, why? The second question is that was this a food safety issue? And also, the news reporters said yes, but actually no and why? How to prevent these types of issues in the future? This is a third question which is normally ignored. To answer these questions correctly, we have to use the science or scientific knowledge. So what is science? I’ll give you another example here, potato. Potato surface has toxic black eyes. So we cannot eat raw potato. Why?

However, we can eat raw sweet potato. Why? We can eat sweet potato directly but not potato. There is a science inside. Another example is yoghourt. Yoghourt is much safer than the fresh milk biologically and chemically. Why? Because there is Lactobacillus activity inside the yoghourt, so also there is a science inside the yoghourt. So these two examples also give us the science to answer this question. What is science actually inside, I mean the really science inside. The potato with the black eyes in potato is a kind of natural attribute for potato; here the attribute is the hazard. So potato has those hazards itself naturally. For yoghourt there is no hazard inside. Pathogenic or negative bacteria would not be there because of the inhibition function of lactobacillus activity inside. There are no antibiotics in yoghurt because lactobacillus cannot grow if antibiotics present. This is natural. We also call it natural rule.

For our course, Science-based Supervision for Food Safety, what is our job? As a food safety supervisor, our job is to check if this potato is peeled or not. Why should we check for it, because there is hazard inside the peel? If not checked, we are not sure if the hazard removed. So check or supervising is so important for us. Similarly, we have to cheek if the milk or the fresh milk pasteurized or UHT processed. Again, if not checked, we are not sure if there pathogenic bacteria inside. It would harm to us, so therefore, our job is to try to use science to understand and use the natural attributes and the rules for our food safety.

What would be taught in this course or what would be involved in this course, we have four major parts for this course? The first one is to understand the foods and food attributes. The second one is to understand the hazards in foods. That is biological hazard, chemical hazard or process induced hazard.

The third part is we want to check if the hazard inside food or not, so method we want to use and the fourth part would be the hazards risk analysis and also risk control in these foods. So these are the main parts in this course we are going to discuss.

Who will teach this course? Actually we have an international team. In addition to myself, we have another four professors all internationally, we have professor Animal from UK, and he holds his PhD from the University of Edinburgh. We have William     from Canada, He holds his PhD from Cornell University, United States. We also have Professor Xiyang Wu, Australia, with his PhD from University of Wollongong, Australia and also Mater Degree from University of Otago, New Zealand. We also have Professor Jiuwei (Jerry) Teng, with his PhD from University of West Virginia,    United States. So this is a real international team. We will try our best to make this course more informative, more knowledgeable, more practical, and more enjoyable. We also provide textbook or references for you to refer.

Here is the popular textbook or reference book used in Northern America. The final part of this introduction is our target for this course. Our target or objective would be three. The first one is trying to understand food safety in the sense of science. That means we have to understand the concept of food safety scientifically. Secondly we are trying to focus on the general knowledge and technology of food safety particularly the hazards.

The more hazards we understand or we know the better we understand the food safety. The third one is trying to build up foundation for our food safety. Of course the purpose for us is to prevent or reduce the risk of food safety. This is a brief introduction for this lecture. See you next lecture.