Meat + Poultry - October 2009 - 8

Commentary
BY KEITH NUNES, EXECUTIVE EDITOR
knunes@sosland.com

Balancing detection
and prevention
There is legitimate concern throughout the food industry about what
form the new food-safety legislation
wending its way through Congress
will take and how it may affect processors. What should be of greater
concern to manufacturers is the impact the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention's PulseNet program
will have on food-safety efforts.
PulseNet was created in response to the 1993 outbreak of
E. coli O157:H7 that killed four children and sickened hundreds. The
program provides federal, state and
local public health officials with the
ability to identify and track clusters
of foodborne illness. As it evolves and
grows, PulseNet will give the public
health community a powerful tool to
detect foodborne illness outbreaks
that previously had gone undetected.
PulseNet is based on DNA "fi ngerprints" generated by pulsedfi eld gel electrophoresis (PFGE)
of samples taken from people who
have fallen ill from foodborne illness
and from suspected food products.
Once the PFGE patterns are generated, they are entered into an electronic database of DNA fi ngerprints
and uploaded to a national database
that is housed at the CDC's offices
in Atlanta. People who are certified
and have access to the database may
then perform searches looking for
clusters or patterns that may identify an outbreak of foodborne illness.
The program has been slow to
evolve as federal officials worked to
convince state and local public health
groups to invest in the program. But
today all 50 states are covered and
PulseNet has been expanded to Canada, Mexico, Latin America, Europe,
the Asia/Pacific region and Australia.

In addition to adding participants at the local, state and international levels, the CDC would like
to create a system that allows for
real-time pathogen sub-typing and
real-time communication. PulseNet
represents a significant achievement

PulseNet will give
the public health
community a
powerful tool to
detect foodborne
illness outbreaks
that previously had
gone undetected.
for the public health community
and it will put significant pressure
on food companies. During the
Grocery Manufacturers Association's Executive Conference, held
last month, two speakers noted the
current impact PulseNet is having
and the challenges an improved
surveillance system may present to
food manufacturers.
To illustrate the effect PulseNet
has had, Frank Yiannas, the vice
president of food safety for Wal-

8 * Meat&Poultry * October 2009 * www.MeatPoultry.com

Mart Stores Inc., said that if the
Peanut Corporation of America
outbreak had occurred just a decade ago, public-health authorities
may not have been able to connect
the dots and identify the source of
the contamination.
A second speaker at the meeting
noted that advances to the PulseNet
surveillance system will occur in the
near term.
"The hard part for them (CDC)
right now is to detect outbreaks from
minor ingredients that go into a lot
of different foods," said Michael
Doyle, director of the Center for
Food Safety at the University of
Georgia. "I will predict that those
problems will be fi xed in a few years
and we will fi nd that a whole lot
more minor ingredients, like spices,
will be potential problems."
To keep pace, food companies
must continue to study and invest
in improved food-safety intervention technologies and ensure they
have the real-time ability to initiate product recalls. The recent introduction of the Food Marketing
Institute's Rapid Recall Exchange
is just one example of how the industry may meet future challenges.
The emergence and improvement
of the PulseNet system means the
defi nition of what is deemed "safe"
is in the process of being changed.
As Yiannas noted at the GMA conference, it appears food manufacturers and public-health authorities
are in a race.
One only needs to look at the
outcomes of some of the food-safety
incidents that have occurred during
the past few years to get a sense of
the consequences of falling behind
in this race. ■

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Meat + Poultry - October 2009

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