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. |