Chapter 14 Food Poisoning and Emergency Response by Dr. Nimal Pathiraja在线视频

Chapter 14 Food Poisoning by Nimal

Welcome to this lecture. In this lecture we are going to talk very briefly Food Poisoning and Emergency Responses. Briefly we are going to look at what is Food Poisoning? What are the emergency responses for an incident?

Food poisoning, the definition is that food poisoning is related to emergency involves the adulteration and/or contamination, threatened or actual, of food, that impacts or may impact on human health. So, basically, food poisoning is food-related emergency. Food-borne illness results from the natural, accidental, or malicious contamination. In other word, it could be simply the hazards by accidence, or it can be introduced into the food by accident or can be added by malicious to make people sick. The impacts of food-borne illness may include morbidity and mortality, increased health care costs, loss of consumer confidence, economic losses, and lost productivity to industry. So food poisoning has lots of implication among other things apart from economic losses to the country and to the industry. Food-borne illness, what do you mean food-borne illness? A human illness, with evidence indicating a food was the source of exposure to the contaminant causing illness. Food-borne illness occurs when a person consumes food contaminated with bacteria, viruses, parasites, or toxins. It should be noted that the food poisoning illness or incident definition may vary among food authorities. What is defined as food poisoning in China maybe slightly different from what is defined in USA or in the Europe Union? Because in the same way, the definition of food is also different from one country to the other. For example, food includes any article manufactured, sold or represented for use as food or drink for human beings, chewing gum, and any ingredient that may be mixed with food for any purpose whatsoever. So the food, the definition of food can vary from country to country.

So what is outbreak? An incident in which two or more persons experience similar illness after a common source exposure. So in other word, for us to call an outbreak, there are must be more than one person affect with this way. An outbreak is identified through laboratory surveillance or an increase in illness that is usual or unusual in terms of time or geography. An outbreak is confirmed through laboratory and/or epidemiological evidence. Food-borne hazard, a biological, chemical, or physical agent in, or a condition of, food that has the potential to cause an adverse health effect.

Now response, what are responses? In response, for food poisoning incident in the context of food-borne illness outbreaks, response includes activities related to the determination, investigation, mitigation, and containment of such outbreaks, as well as related communication activities.

So what is the most important thing is that today in the globalized food market, food is a globalize commodity, when food poisoning has originally come from one country and cases may be reported in many countries in the world. Food-borne illness outbreaks associated with widely distributed foods result in human illnesses that go cross international boundaries. Action by food authorities. When we have food poisoning outbreak, food authorities will have to take action. Number one is to contain the incident, and also to find out the where there came from and to stop it happening further. The regulatory authorities who are responsible for human health and food safety respond to these events through the development of enhanced food-borne illness surveillance networks. So there are different kinds of networks. Some of them are national, some are international. So what we do is that, because of this one, we have to increase concern and public awareness of food safety has highlighted the demand for swift resolution of food safety issues at a time when they are becoming increasingly complex.

As I already said, the reason for the incident may happen one country, but the cases may be reported by many countries in the world. For example, many countries food authorities have Food-borne Illness Outbreak Response Procedures. So the procedures depend on the country what they are trying to do. They have protocols, they have systems, and they follow it. These protocols address potential food-borne illness outbreaks resulting from the natural, accidental, or intentional contamination of foods by microbiological, chemical, or other hazardous substances. For example, radio nuclear hazards are also the common things. These procedures focus primarily on developing a coordinated response that is needed to mitigate food-borne illness outbreaks. In other words, many departments may be involved when food poisoning incidents coming to place. Customers department, animal health department, human health department, agricultural department and food safety authority and so on.

The primary objective of the activities is described in the food authority protocol. When you are going to many of food authorities, their websites will give you how are they going to investigate this system. There are laboratory procedures, epidemiological procedures, food processing procedures and so on. These investigations need the support from many organizations, and therefore collaboration among them is needed. For example, it may be food authority, ministry of health, agriculture, local authority, police, customs, and port authorities. All these people may be influenced.

Human illness potentially linked to food is the one we are going to investigate. So the first thing is identification of a food-borne hazard. What is the thing that is causing? Once we identify this, then we have to find out where it is come from, we have to confirm them by laboratory mean and other means, and then we try to control the spread of the disease and also for the future what we are going to do. This is what all about it.

Immediate closure. When we have food poisoning outbreak, one of the immediate closure may be to stop production in that particular factories or the food factory or in the farm activity. This is happening in many countries. But for us to do that we are worried to discuss about what we need to do is that we must have the correct regulation. If we don’t have the regulations, we cannot stop producing food from the particular food factories. So this is why we must have the correct regulations with the country. Let's look some of them, so stick to stop the solution of the food in question, stop importation, stop sells. For us all these things to do, we must have appropriate regulation.

For many of the actions it is necessary to have the appropriate legal framework, without the legal framework, we cannot do anything about it. Some of these legal frameworks are national, some of them are international. For example, WHO/INFOSAN/OIE. Finally it is important to see that the actions are taken to prevent such illnesses in the future.

So if they find the food incident or food poisoning is due to terrorism, then we have to investigate in the completely different way. That is where the police or other international organization. We have to do some exchange information with other countries, international organization and also in the industry. Communicate with the public and finally we have to find out what has happened and review. One of the most important things in food poisoning incident outbreak is the communication with public. We have to tell people right from the beginning what we know about the incident, what we don’t know about the incident and also we have to tell this incident now. No point to tell the people ten days later after the incident. The food authority must tell them exactly as soon as possible what we know, what we don’t know and we must tell them now.

Thank you very much.