LINCOLN, Neb. -- Food safety has come a long way since cook Mary Mallon inadvertently infected dozens of New Yorkers with typhoid fever a century ago, but major challenges to assuring a safe food supply still exist, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln food safety specialist said Monday.
UNL Extension's Harshavardhan Thippareddi used the story of Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary, to outline the history of food safety during the first day of an international conference on food safety and risk analysis, being held on UNL's East Campus.
The first person confirmed to be a healthy carrier of typhoid fever, Mallon infected more than 40 people, three of whom died. Typhoid fever is spread by ingesting water or food which has been contaminated during handling by a human carrier.
"That's when we started to realize food can be a carrier of illness or death," Thippareddi said. "We have made significant progress from that day ... We have better ways of tracking, better ways of controlling" foodborne illness.
However, that progress is not equally spread, said Ricardo Molins, director of agricultural health and food safety of the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture.
Parts of Latin America "are very behind in food safety," Molins told conference attendees. "We need to make a greater effort."
Molins and Rolando Flores, head of UNL's Department of Food Science and Technology, said they hope this week's conference, which brings together scientists from UNL with influential personnel in agricultural policy making from countries such as Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, Argentina and Chile, can help close that gap. Among the attendees are 15 staff members of the Ministry of Agriculture in Costa Rica.
"We want to develop collaborative links that can assist us in the future," Flores said.
One challenge is that the "issues of one country can be completely different from issues of another country," Thippareddi said.
Another challenge is that it's easier to mandate and enforce food safety standards at the processor level than at the producer level.
"You cannot expect the processor to clean up everything that comes through from the farm," Molins said.
Presented in both English and Spanish, the conference, at Chase Hall, is addressing a variety of issues, including food safety requirements placed upon internationally traded food products, assessment of risk in food processing systems, identification of and protection against common contaminants, and good manufacturing practices in the food processing industry.
The conference is sponsored by UNL's Food Processing Center and Department of Food Science and Technology, both part of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture.
Sources:
Rolando Flores, Ph.D., head, food science and technology department
Harshavardhan Thippareddi, Ph.D., associate professor, food science and technology department
Writer:
Dan Moser, IANR News Service
