Food Protection Trends - July 2009 - 424

“perspectives” from your president appy, sad, proud, confident – these are just a few of the feelings that I have as I write this, my last column as the President of IAFP. Happy that I will not have to think of a new topic to write about next month and that I will have the opportunity to work on the Board with Katie Swanson in the coming year. Sad that I will no longer be working on the Board with Gary Acuff, whom I have had the pleasure of working with for the past four years and who I sincerely admire for his kindness, intellect, and devotion to IAFP. Proud of David Tharp, the IAFP staff, and the many volunteers who make IAFP the great organization that it is. Confident that the initiatives that the Board has made this year and for the last four years will continue to help IAFP grow and fulfill its mission. As I reflect on the past year, there have been many changes and challenges in the production and distribution of foods. The past year has also been challenging to the US and global economy in many ways. The food industry has been the reoccurrence of Salmonella in nuts and other low moisture foods and continued problems with Listeria monocytogenes, and E. coli O157:H7, all at a time when many companies and regulatory laboratories have been asked to reduce the money they are spending in their laboratories. The movement of foodstuffs around the globe continued to grow in 2009. Assuring the safety of imported/ exported raw foods, processed foods, and food ingredients is currently and will continue to be a major challenge for the regulatory agencies in all countries. Perhaps the biggest challenge in the import/export area is to try and develop harmonization of both food production standards and inspection criteria. No country wants to lose their independence when determining how to produce and inspect foods, but H By STAN BAILEy PRESIDENT “I am particularly proud of the role that IAFP has and will continue to play in this movement toward a safer food supply” every country having a different set of standards and regulations places a huge and expensive burden on the food companies trying to certify that their products meet each of the different standards. Although an arduous process, most countries are working through CODEX to determine minimally acceptable production and inspection standards. Just as food companies are challenged by different standards and criteria, microbiology diagnostic companies are challenged to produce and validate microbiological assays that do the same thing no matter where they are used but which must be certified by different validating bodies in different countries and areas of the world. In the US and some other areas, methods that have been validated by AOAC are accepted by most of the food industry and FDA. FSIS does not necessarily accept AOAC as sufficient validation and insists that food companies inspected by FSIS used methods that they recognize or that have been validated independently to standards specified by FSIS. In Europe and other areas of the world, methods must be validated to ISO standards. This is most often done through AFNOR or MicroVal. As you can see, this can be cumbersome and very expensive to companies developing new assays. Fortunately, AOAC and some of the other validating bodies have been working to develop a process that would allow the different validating bodies to accept one another’s data and lead to the global recognition and acceptance of validated methods. I do not want my last column to reflect too much on the negative challenges that companies, regulatory agencies, and individuals have faced this year. We have many success stories to celebrate and new opportunities and directions to grow. As I discussed in a recent column, I sincerely believe that our food supply is safer today than in previous years because we continue to develop technologies to detect pathogens more efficiently and improved technologies to compare the “genetic fingerprint” of these pathogens to each other, thus allowing more and more frequent detection of foodborne outbreaks. As a global food society, I expect the use and strength 424 FOOD PROTECTION TRENDS | JULY 2009

Food Protection Trends - July 2009

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