FDA Creates The Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance (FSPCA) To Develop Training Courses And Materials For Prevention Of Contamination
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in cooperation with the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute for Food Safety and Health (IIT IFSH) created the Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance (FSPCA) to develop materials to will help the industry comply with the new preventive control rules.
The Alliance is composed of members from the FDA, loca and state food protection agencies, the food industry and academia.
Under the FSMA, facilities are required to develop food safety plans that evaluate food safety hazards and identify the preventive measures to guard against those hazards. Facilities must also monitor preventive measures and manufacturers must also develop a plan of action to correct any problems that are discovered.
The Alliance will develop training modules, to train the trainer, develop industry specific measures, assess the need for future research, and prioritize the need for specific controls.
Defending Liability in Foodborne Illness Outbreaks
I’m asked frequently about the “anatomy of litigation.” I plan to write more in this space on the topic. For now, some may find useful the slides from a presentation I gave recently on “Defending Liability in Foodborne Illness Outbreaks.” I discussed what I see as three prototypes of consumer claims and possible strategies to respond to each.
Next Generation Sequencing for the Food Industry
More and more, it is becoming true that nothing drives detection and prevention of food-borne illness than technology (and, of course, with advancements in detection come potential increases in exposure to legal liability). No technological advancement may be more significant than Next Generation Sequencing ("Next Gen Sequencing").
I've recently had the opportunity to spend time learning about Next Gen Sequencing
with Dr. Andrew Benson, a genetic microbiologist at the University of Nebraska’s Department of Food Science and Technology. Dr. Benson has received large research grants to harness the power of Next Gen sequencing. If you’re interested in the field, take a look at this short video, where Dr. Benson explains the technology, and check out the information on the CAGE (Core for Applied Genomics and Ecology) website.
As described on the CAGE website, this Next Gen technology “allows a single machine to accomplish in 48 hours what used to take an entire room full of machines and an army of
staff a month to achieve.”
Dr. Benson and others at CAGE explain further that:
Having such a powerful diagnostic technique now challenges us to rethink completely how we might go about risk assessment. Instead of looking for a single “indicator organism” in a food sample, we can now look at the entire population of microorganisms in a food sample and ask if the community of organisms present is the expected species that normally occupy that food or if the sample contains numbers of unexpected species, and in particular those species that are unique to fecal or soil environments. Thus, our assessment of “risk” is now based on the entire population, including the most abundant species of fecal and soil communities. Because our assessment is based on the entire composition, multiple species that are unique to feces or soil can be used in the determination, making the assessment much more accurate and robust. Moreover, the assessment is not limited to “risk” as we can also determine if the microbial community in a food sample has shifted toward spoilage (which gives us shelf-life predictions) or is consistent with “good” organoleptic properties of the food. The list of applications goes on and on.
Discoveries using this technology are happening at astonishing speed. PFGE testing, now considered the "gold standard" and generic E.coli testing may soon seem old fashioned and crude.
