AQIA Annual Meeting / Session : Perspectives on Food Safety and Sustainability

Emerging pathogens pose a substantial risk to animal and human health. Pathogens can emerge due to the acquisition of virulence factors through genetic mutation and horizontal gene transfer and due to ecological processes, that alter their host range. Some of these factors are increasing due to agricultural intensification, demographic shifts, human insurgence into natural ecosystems and global environmental changes.

Global megatrends including globalization, climate change, a growing and aging population, urbanisation, and increased affluence have created new food safety challenges and placed additional demands on producers, manufacturers, retailers and regulators. Advances in science and technology such as whole genome sequencing, developments in tracing and tracking technologies, information computing technology and big data analysis with the help of AI/machine learning have the potential to help mitigate the challenges and meet demands, but can also create new challenges. 

This presentation will cover some of the older established bacterial foodborne pathogens in which interesting new findings have been made, for example, the emergence of Bacillus cereus group bacteria containing anthrax toxin genes typically associated with Bacillus anthracis. It will also address the ever-expanding list of new pathogen-food vehicle outbreak combinations. Potentially emerging pathogens such as Burkholderia cocovenenans have been detected simultaneously in coconut- and corn-based products responsible for foodborne outbreaks in Indonesia, China and Mozambique.

Foodborne viruses continue to be a challenge for both the food industry and regulators, especially in how public health agencies deal with cases where single food samples such as berries become positive for, e.g., hepatitis A on an RT qPCR test, with no additional weight of evidence such as strong epidemiological data.

Besides dealing with the emergence and re-emergence of pathogens, there are also many issues that will affect food safety now and into the future. Some of these include metagenomics/culture-independent diagnostic testing, evolving trends/food markets, plant-based foods/cellular agriculture, reduced food waste, microbiome/probiotics and continued novel modes of food delivery/distribution such as drones and ghost kitchens/food preparation outside the home.

The food industry accounts for 10% of global GDP, with an $8 trillion global supply chain employing around 1.5 billion people (The Economist, 2020). Sustainability is a broadly used term that indicates programs, initiatives, and/or actions intended to preserve finite resources. Those resources can be classified in four major categories or ‘pillars’ — human, social, economic, and environmental.  They all interact, but this presentation will focus primarily on environmental sustainability as it relates to the human food supply and specifically, food safety.  Many of the major sustainability initiatives can have trickle-down implications, both intended and unintended, on food safety.   From e-commerce and home food delivery to vertical farming to alternative protein sources and nanotechnology-enabled “smart” packaging materials, among many other trends, the adoption of these technologies will almost certainly impact the safety of the food supply.  Climate change in and of itself is already changing the dynamics of food production and processing.  Using concepts and specific examples, this futuristic presentation will cover known and hypothesized impacts of the sustainability movement on the safety of the global food supply.

Agriculture is the only industry capable of carbon sequestration, thus effectively contributing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If all the world’s agricultural soils sequestered 0.4% of carbon annually, the planet would be carbon-neutral! This presentation will explain the important key points of this process, also leading to benefits that promote food safety.

Five students or postdoctoral fellows will present their research projects related to themes such as hygiene, food quality, allergens, microbiology, infectious diseases, detection methods, and food sustainability in just 300 seconds, which is 5 minutes.

Abstract to come.