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This is a full transcript of the online presentation. For the
presentation itself, go here. Presented
by:
Roberta Hammond, PhD, RS.
Food and Waterborne Disease Coordinator
Division of Environmental Health
Contact Number: 850-245-4116
Hi, I'm Roberta Hammond. Im the Statewide Food & Waterborne Disease
Coordinator. I will be speaking to
you about food and waterborne disease security issues.
Food is vital to Florida;
we have 76,000,000 million visitors a year and we have something like
17,000,000 million residents. Everybody eats. We rely on the citrus
industry and other agriculture industries like the cattle industry. Our
food supply is vulnerable. It comes from around the world and centralized
production creates the possibility of targets.
The risks related to food are that food resources could be destroyed or
contamination could cause an outbreak. In terms of destruction of food
resources, this risk involves the destruction of crops or other food
resources to make them unavailable for use, through conventional explosives
or crop pathogens.
In terms of outbreaks, the definition of an outbreak is an incident
where two or more people have the same disease, have similar symptoms, or
excrete the same pathogens, and there is a time place or persons
association between these persons. A food borne disease outbreak is one in
which a common food has been ingested by these persons.
We also take a special interest in botulism, mushroom poisoning,
ciguatera or paralytic shellfish poisoning, other rare diseases, or a case
of a disease that can be definitely related to ingestion of a food. Any of
these can be considered as an incident of food borne illness and warrant
further investigation.
For our purposes, the definition for bioterrorism is any attempt to
contaminate food for the purpose of causing harm, no matter what the
source.
The risk of an unintentional food borne outbreak is actually pretty
common: There are an estimated 76 million cases per year of food borne
disease in the U.S.
with about 355,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.
Food has been dubbed a potential terrorist target in homeland security.
Several Class A & B bioterrorism agents can be transmitted through
food. These include botulism,
anthrax, salmonella, E. coli, and shigella (which
causes dysentery).
The question is Has it been done before? Well, yes, it has been done
before. In this century food has been used for bio-warfare and terrorist
activities. Both the U.S. & U.S.S.R. tested bio-warfare programs using
food contamination during the cold war. In 1978, Israeli citrus was
contaminated with mercury by Palestinians to protest the state of Israel.
And in 1989: Chilean grapes were
injected with cyanide by Chilean workers to hurt Pinochets
regime.
In this country it happened in 1984 in The Dalles, Oregon were 751 people became ill with Salmonellosis. This was associated with consumption of
food from an salad bars. There was an extensive
investigation. The Bhagwan Shree
Rajneesh Cult was identified a year later after an informant contacted the
police. The purpose of this event was to influence a local election
outcome.
More recently in New Sweden,
Maine (2003) arsenic was put
in coffee at a church. This caused
one death and 15 hospitalizations. The main suspect shot himself before the
investigation could be concluded.
This was motivated by church politics. So it can happen at any scale
large and small.
Why is it more of a concern now?
We are concerned because we have a global food economy, so there are
a lot more opportunities. The U.S.
now imports more food per year than it exports including 1.9 million
cattle, 700,000 swine, and 28 million birds. The amount of imported food
grows by around 6% a year.
Some examples for outbreaks from international food sources include cyclospora from Guatemalan red raspberries in 1996; Shigella and E. coli in parsley from Mexico, 1998; Typhoid fever outbreak from
frozen imported mamey from Guatemala, 1999; and Hepatitis A in green
onions from Mexico,
2003.
The U.S.
food supply is increasingly characterized by centralized production and
wide distribution of products. The heavy concentration of the agriculture
industry makes food sources a higher value target. For instance: Feedlots.
Cattle feedlots can hold 300,000 head, and 78% of U.S. beef stock
go thru 2% of feedlots. This creates a high impact bottleneck which
is vulnerable to some kind of terrorist activity.
Since food is distributed widely from a centralized location,
contamination has the potential for a rapid and wide impact. 170,000
Salmonella typhimurium cases from contaminated
pasteurized milk happened in the United States in 1985 and
224,000 people came down with Salmonella enteritidis
in ice cream in a contaminated truck in 1994. These were nationwide
outbreaks.
From 1993 to 1997, CDC estimates that 2,751 outbreaks causing 86,000
illnesses in food borne disease were reported. Most of these are
investigated by local county health departments, who will be the frontline
in any intentional outbreak as well as the routine unintentional outbreaks.
Of the thousand or so unintentional outbreaks that CDC did investigate themselves: 44 were caused by potential bioterrorism
bugs and 55% were reported by medical providers or health departments.
In conclusion public health and partners to public health play a
critical role in discovering and mitigating food borne outbreaks whether
intentional or not. In the next presentation youll find out how to help be
prepared for food borne outbreaks. Thank you.
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