National Center for Food Protection and Defense

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The National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD) was officially launched as a Homeland Security Center of Excellence in July 2004. A multidisciplinary and action-oriented research consortium, NCFPD addresses the vulnerability of the nation's food system to attack through intentional contamination with biological or chemical agents.

NCFPD's research and education program is aimed at reducing the potential for contamination at any point along the food supply chain and mitigating potentially catastrophic public health and economic effects of such attacks. The program incorporates cutting-edge research across a wide range of disciplines, taking a comprehensive, farm-to-table view of the food system and encompassing all aspects from primary production through transportation and food processing to retail and food service.

Access FAS-CAT Here

FAS-CAT 1.0 has been released.  Download the FAS-CAT Excel file and the accompanying PDF Guidance document below.  The Video Tutorial is now online via streaming video.

FAS-CAT 1.0   Guidance Document Video Tutorial

 

 
National Center for Food Protection and Defense

NCFPD News
Message From the Director - January 2009

As we move into 2009, predicting emerging threats is a necessary but difficult task.  Entering into 2008, neither the economic adulteration of sunflower oil in Europe or protein powders in China would have been predicted as some of the top news stories. And yet, the melamine contamination of Chinese food products was rated by the Marler Blog as being the number one food safety story of 2008.  And WebMD picked the Salmonella Saintpaul contamination of fresh produce from Mexico as the number one health news story. When trying to protect our food system from intentional or unintentional contamination, these events illustrate the need to expand the scope of things we need to consider. With the worsening economy, economic adulteration, the motive for the melamine contamination in China, will likely become a bigger problem. This will increase the importance of detection, surveillance, and sampling strategies to try to prevent the spread of contaminated food products, but there is no perfect solution. (See "Why can't we test our way to absolute food safety?" Science, 12 December 2008.) When we are considering intentional contamination, whether for economic gain or intentional harm, we don’t always know the public health risks or concerns we’re encountering because we’re not used to those agents. Originally, melamine was thought to be benign from a human health standpoint, but a recent WHO report illustrates that there is a lot we did not know about the potential health impacts of melamine, because it was something we had not studied. By definition, emerging threats are ones we haven’t seen yet. We have to be ready to encounter them, and respond quickly, and that’s what the ultimate goal of our research is: to narrow that field of emerging threats, and enhance our ability to respond effectively to minimize the potential public health consequences of intentional or unintentional food contamination.

Published: 01/13/2009 Edited: 01/15/2009

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