Hi, I'm Dr. Gay Miller. I'm a professor here at the University of Illinois in the College of Veterinary Medicine. I'm going to share with you some basic things about food safety and public health and how we ensure that the foods that you eat in the United States are safe for you to consume. First, let's talk a little bit about our public health infrastructure. The county level Public Health Department or the Municipal, or city level Public Health Departments are really the first line of defense in our basic public health infrastructure. They work then with, you go up the chain in terms of organization, the state-level health departments. Then, of course, our federal agencies that are involved. So, our CDC, Centers for Disease Control, they are really our risk identification infrastructure or agency. Then, we have them working simultaneously with our regulatory federal agencies. So, our Food Safety Inspection Service, which is a part of USDA, and of course, EPA is a component there. So, we really have quite a bit of depth in our food safety and infrastructure, our public health infrastructure. They're working all the time to try to identify foods that would be dangerous for consumers to eat in this country. Of course, also, making sure that the foods that we export from this country are equally safe and looking at the foods that we import into this country and making sure that they're safe too. Really, when we think about foodborne illness and disease control, we think about a cycle of investigation that's going on. So, it involves the most important components, the epidemiology and investigating outbreaks or looking for the development of illnesses in people that would relate. Certainly, doing surveillance and testing associated with illnesses that are happening in people. Also, testing of our various food products and testing of the environments in which foods are actually manufactured. It funnels right into basic applied research. What do we know that we learn about how to manage inside food manufacturing systems, inside food production systems, so clear back to the farm level. Also, what do we know about what we should be doing to enhance safety in our kitchens, in our restaurants, all of those elements. So, it's this continuous cycle of improvement as the way that we control foodborne disease in this country. One important component of our food safety structure now is PulseNet USA. What PulseNet is, is it's a wide network of laboratories that are either at state laboratories or municipal laboratories, looking at and doing testing of foods and also people who have had symptoms associated with foodborne illness. The kinds of symptoms that we have when people are sick from eating foods. They're not very pleasant symptoms unfortunately; vomiting, diarrhea, they can get fever. But you can get really, really sick associated with foodborne illness even to the point where you'll be hackneyed hospitalization. There are deaths associated with foodborne illness. It is not a casual circumstance and it affects a huge number of people. But back to PulseNet USA. Basically, what that group is looking at is, in their testing, to create a genetic fingerprint of the organisms that are associated with the foodborne illness. That fingerprint then, can be used to trace the organism through the food chain. So, let's talk just a little bit about the timeline of an outbreak. A person consumes a food and a few days later, they may get sick associated with that- having consumed that food. Maybe they get sick enough that they go to the doctor a few days later. Then, the doctor may decide that they're sick enough to take a stool sample or a vomitus sample. Then, it takes another few days to analyze that specimen and determine and actually culture the organism. From there, a submission will be made to PulseNet and they'll fingerprint the organism. Then, maybe it is occurring at enough of a level that they actually begin a further investigation. So, now we are potentially out two, three weeks before they go back to actually interview the case and try to get some additional information. Investigations continue. Maybe they actually identify and implicate a particular food. They, in that epidemiologic investigation, get histories about what were the foods that were eaten, what foods do they think actually may have caused the illness. Of course, at that point in time, maybe none of the food is left, either in the restaurant where the food was initially consumed, or in the home where the food was consumed. So, this whole process of investigating the timeline during an outbreak can take weeks, even months, before it's actually completed. That's part of what makes foodborne illness both exciting and also challenging to do. This laboratory and the capability that we have now with PFGE or the Pulsed-Field Gel Electrophoresis, the method of fingerprinting the organism though, has made it so that we can see outbreaks, see them in a completely different fashion than we could years ago. So, we can literally identify the organism from the person and trace that back into the food, even trace it back to the environment, for example, in a food manufacturing site and potentially clear back to the farm. In terms of our overall food consumption patterns, we have two big categories: animals and animal products and our vegetables, and so forth. Different groups are responsible for different aspects of those, but both can generate foodborne illness in people. The types of organisms are a little bit different, but they can overlap quite a bit. So, a person gets sick, that isn't going to be clear if they got sick actually from consuming chicken, or turkey, or beef, or if they got sick from consuming leafy greens, or tomatoes, or any of the other produce that they could eat. Why it is important, actually, is because of the amount of illness that actually occurs. It's surprising how much illness we have in the United States, even though we consider that we have one of, if not, the safest food supply in the world. There are more than 40-50 million estimated cases of foodborne illness that occur every year in the United States. Several thousand of those cases actually end up being hospitalized, actually, tens of thousands end up being hospitalized. Some few thousand individuals unfortunately die from foodborne illness. Those individuals tend to be the very young, the very old, and the immunocompromised. But, literally, anyone can get sick from foodborne illness. It really is a serious condition, not only in the US, but also around the world. So, I think it's actually important to think about the control of foodborne illness through the whole spectrum of the food chain. We don't want to give up any component of that to say, "We're going to allow another component to be the responsible parties for making sure that what we eat is safe food in this country." So, it begins on the farm with good manufacturing practices that are good basic animal husbandry practices. It includes then, appropriate transportation of the animals and appropriate handling during that transportation. It includes good practices in terms of how the waste of animals are actually handled. It includes good practices about how our produce is grown on the farms in this country. It also includes, and it's very important that testing be done for foods that are imported into this country because we'd like to, in fact, the Food Safety Modernization Act basically specifies that the standards are going to be the same for foods that are produced in this country as they are for foods that are imported into this country. But back to our basic food chain. So, it's important that good practices happen in transport of animals and product to manufacturing. It's important that what happens at the processing plants are appropriate with good hygiene that happens there. Then, of course, how foods are packaged and how foods are handled throughout the chain, in terms of temperature and basic hygiene practices. Then, what happens actually in the grocery stores, and in the restaurants, and of course, in the home, where a lot of food is handled and prepared. All of those components are really important components. Let's talk about what you, as a consumer, for example, could do because much of your foods in the control of organisms is actually outside of an individual consumer's control. You don't control, typically, the foods and how they're produced on the farm. That's handled by the farmers and also by the agencies that oversee that work. Similarly, what's happening in the manufacturing plants are controlled by you. But you, as the consumer, can do a lot to improve food safety because all of the practices that are in place to ensure that safe foods come to you can be ruined, if you will, by inappropriate action by consumer. So, if inside your kitchen, you allow for cross-contamination to occur because you mix raw meat and cut it up on a cutting board, and then put raw produce that you're not going to cook onto that cutting board, and eat it raw, the potential is that it is going to be contaminated with whatever organism was in the raw meat. We should assume, even though there are good practices in providing meat that is not ready to eat that comes to the kitchen, you should assume that it is potentially contaminated and handle it accordingly. So, you use good hygiene in your kitchen. You cook it to a proper temperature. You use a thermometer to ensure that you're cooking it to a proper temperature. You have it out once it's been prepared only a certain amount of time. If it's not consumed, then it either has to be discarded or has to be refrigerated to an appropriate temperature. Then, consumed before it goes bad in your refrigerator. In terms of the other things that you can do inside your kitchen: hand washing. Incredibly important. Also, washing a produce because you can eliminate a fair amount of external contamination that comes on produce that has the potential then to cause cross-contamination.
