Question

- Discus the following recent issues related to food safety concern:

1. Naturally occurring chemicals

2. New and evolving pathogens

Answer 1

1.

Naturally occurring toxins include mycotoxins, marine biotoxins, cyanogenic glycosides and toxins occurring in poisonous mushrooms. Staple foods like corn or cereals can contain high levels of mycotoxins, such as aflatoxin and ochratoxin, produced by mould on grain. A long-term exposure can affect the immune system and normal development, or cause cancer.

Food is a crucial contributor to human health well-being and a major source of worry, pleasures, and stress , with one of the reasons behind the stress and worry, are the diseases caused as a result of contaminated food. There are multiple reasons for the contamination of food . Food preparation undergoes through a long chain of processing, where each stage is a potential source of chemical contaminants invasion of the food. Transportation of food can also lay the foundation for contamination of food, specifically under poor sanitary conditions . Likewise, some chemicals are mixed deliberately during the food preparation process to improve the shelf life of a food product. The contaminants may include impurity food when cooked in the kitchen; nevertheless, the transmission is mainly dependent on the effectiveness of the kitchen hygiene though. Chemical contaminants enter the food chain naturally as well with pathogens that are present in the environment and show high bacterial numbers on some key raw foods such as poultry meat.

The chemical contamination of food has emerged as a serious concern with potential health hazards in their wake. Majority of the food contamination occurs through naturally occurring toxins and environmental pollutants or during the processing, packaging, preparing, storage, and transportation of food. As the technology advances, the detection of such contaminants becomes easier. However, there are several contaminants that are still unknown and research continues in this regard.

2.

New food-borne pathogens emerge when previously unrecognized pathogens are identified and are linked to foodborne transmission from the beginning, or when foodborne transmission is documented for pathogens that are already well known. The list of foodborne agents that have emerged in the past three decades includes bacteria, viruses, parasites, biotoxins, and a prion.They often emerge from animal reservoirs; 70 percent are sustained in animal populations and affect humans only incidentally. Many were identified in the course of outbreak investigations, when both their pathogenicity and association with food could be determined. Some common bacterial foodborne pathogens are adapted to particular reservoirs, making targeted control strategies feasible.

The complex and changing biological web of the human food supply means that we can expect new pathogens to emerge and novel food vehicles to be identified. Many of these will start in animal reservoirs and may reach us through both animal- and plant-derived foods. Much of the recent progress that has occurred in food safety has been the result of focused efforts to reduce contamination after harvest.

Contamination can start well before harvest or slaughter, and interventions that focus on the live animal or plant are needed to make further progress in making food safer. Such intervention will depend on understanding the biology of pathogens in the field, their life cycles, and the points at which contamination can be prevented or interrupted. Detecting the new problems will depend on robust capacity for public health surveillance and investigation and on multidisciplinary understanding of the ecologies that sustain them. With our global food supply, problems that arise in one part of the world can spread rapidly, if they enter the global food trade. Improving the safety of the food supply thus depends on stronger public health capacity around the world, better understanding of new challenges wherever they are identified, and translating that understanding into effective prevention from farm to table.

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