Food Safety Assignment
List of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Relative importance of pathogens
3. Trends in foodborne illness
4. Emerging issues
5. Intervention strategies
6. Conclusion
7. References
1. Introduction
From the very dawn of the mankind people have suffered from an array of infectious diseases. Advances in the ways of diagnostics and treatment allow us to ease this burden on the humanity. Information technology has provided scientific community with a chance to better control and, which is the most important, prevent foodborne diseases by gathering, analyzing and interpreting epidemiological data from a vast number of sites. Conclusions drawn as a result of such surveillance (trends in incidence, prevalence, endemicity of important pathogens, number of outbreaks, most common vehicles of infection, etc.) can be used to design intervention strategies to eradicate a disease as well as to assess a degree of success of food safety measures.
Initially, epidemiological surveillance was limited to scientific trials or a certain disease; collection of data on a wider, national, scale was passive. But even these scarce results were able to convince authorities in many countries to approach this issue seriously, in a systemic manner and with bigger amount of resources. In the USA the best known at the moment program, FoodNet or Foodborne diseases Active Surveillance Network, was launched on January 1, 1996. At first it covered only the territory with 13.2 million residents and required active collection of laboratory confirmed diagnoses on just seven potentially foodborne diseases all of which were caused by bacteria. According to the latest Preliminary FoodNet Data on the Incidence of Infection with Pathogens Transmitted Commonly Through Food in 2007 the active surveillance network covered confirmed diagnoses on 7 bacterial, 2 protozoal pathogens and one