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By Nathan Peck | MiBiz
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BATTLE CREEK — As the E. coli outbreak in Germany that has killed 39 people continues to dominate headlines around Europe, experts warn that the U.S. food system is still at risk and could have significant consequences for agriculture, food processors and others tied to the industry.

As the source of the contamination remains elusive, there are lessons to be gleaned from the experience of food safety professionals in the United States. Bringing together the expertise of food inspectors, industry and public health officials, the International Food Protection and Training Institute in Battle Creek is working to improve the safety of the U.S. food supply and speed up the response to outbreaks of food-borne illness.

The U.S. has had a series of significant food safety incidents in recent memory, said Gerald Wojtala, executive director of the IFPTI. The difficulty is that there are competing interests behind the system’s response to emergencies.

“We are working toward a coordinated response to food emergencies. You want to be fast and you want to be right. You have to do both. We want to be both fast and right,” Wojtala said.

Thomas Tucker, director of the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, said that the food distribution system in the U.S. leaves the nation vulnerable to such outbreaks. The NCBRT is partnering with the IFPTI and its training partners to deliver programs to help inspectors and the food processing industry get ahead of the problem and prepare for these outbreaks. The IFPTI is delivering courses on coordinating the national response to food emergencies.

“The deadly E. coli outbreak in Europe should not be a surprise. This type of outbreak could happen anywhere,” Tucker said in a statement. “We are especially vulnerable here in the United States with our complex processing and distribution system and high volume of imported goods.”

Identity crisis

The first indications of contamination often are wrong and can have devastating effects on agriculture. In the German outbreak, Spanish cucumbers were originally identified, then bean sprouts. Complicating matters was the slowness of the response. The longer it takes to put public health officials in touch with victims of the illness, the less likely it is those victims will be able to help them track the source of the contamination.

“When people ask the question: Could this happen here? Yes, it could. It has happened. We have seen a number of similar things that are happening in Germany: Misidentifying the product, slowness of the response, having difficulty identifying, controlling and containing the outbreak,” Wojtala told MiBiz.

Investigators of a 2008 outbreak of E. coli in the United States initially misidentified tomatoes as the source of the outbreak. From supermarkets to fast food restaurants, businesses pulled fresh tomatoes off their shelves. Unfortunately, the first indications were wrong: Green peppers were later determined to be the source.

“(Identifying sources) has gotten a lot better. We’ve learned from our errors in the past. There needs to be a lot more evidence now before FDA implicates a certain commodity,” Wojtala said. “Better evidence allows us to better implicate the product. We realize that this has a huge economic impact on those commodities, those companies, and consumers. It has happened in the past and we hurt the entire tomato crop in the U.S. as a result.”

Common tools, approaches

Complicating the work of investigators is that the diffuse healthcare, public health and food safety systems rarely speak the same professional languages. There are different decision trees guiding the process when information is shared among other members of the food safety system.

“We need standard training, but also standardization within the system. We have 3,000 different health departments with 3,000 different policies,” said Joan Bowman, spokeswoman for the IFPTI. “The standardization piece is so important to coordinated response.”

The Food Safety and Modernization Act helped clarify when public health officials must be notified about problems with food products and when products must be recalled.

“When a company becomes aware of a lab result that indicates one of its products has a problem, they are required to report it,” Wojtala said. “The big challenge is to help industry understand these new rules and that a lot of it is voluntary but a lot of it is also is mandatory.”

Talk early, talk often Wojtala said that information becomes the most significant commodity to a successful response.

“There is an idea that you don’t want to scare the public with information, (but) it really is a false premise. Frequent communication helps minimize impact and helps with consumer confidence,” he said. “The way you communicate with the public is important. It is not only having the best person out there talking to media and providing accurate and frequent information to the public. Today, there are better tools to get information out than before.”