Food-Borne Disease Prevention and Risk Assessment

Dear Colleagues,

A Special Issue entitled “Food-Borne Disease Prevention and Risk Assessment” is being organized for the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Despite decades of government and industry interventions, foodborne disease remains unexpectedly high in both developed and developing nations. For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that one in six persons in the United States suffers from gastroenteritis each year, with up to 3,000 fatalities arising from consumption of contaminated food. According to the WHO Initiative to Estimate the Global Burden of Foodborne Diseases, 31 global hazards caused 600 million foodborne illnesses and 420,000 deaths in 2010; diarrhoeal disease agents were the leading cause of these in most regions. Since we know that most foodborne diseases are preventable, these are astonishing figures for the 21^st century. We are familiar with some of the underlying conditions: unsafe water used for the cleaning and processing of food, poor food-production processes, inadequate storage, and food-handling practices including infected food workers and cross-contamination of food. These can be coupled with inadequate or poorly enforced regulatory standards and industry compliance. However, knowledge of these is not enough. Making advances in prevention and control practices requires a suite of interlinked actions from improvements in the investigation of complaints and illnesses to finding the root cause of outbreaks; applying rapid and accurate identification of the hazards present; determining the conditions in which pathogens grow and multiply in order to eliminate or reduce these numbers; developing targeted intervention strategies; understanding human behavior with respect to food processing and preparation; producing effective educational and training programs; evaluating the risks of existing and modified food production and preparation practices; predicting how effective potential interventions would be, and introducing effective and enforceable codes of practice for the different harvesting, processing, and preparing industry components.

This Special Issue is open to the subject area of Food-Borne Disease Prevention and Risk Assessment. For detailed information on the journal, I refer you to https://0-www-mdpi-com.brum.beds.ac.uk/journal/ijerph.

Prof. Ewen C. D. Todd
Prof. Dr. Fernando Pérez-Rodríguez
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Foodborne disease surveillance and monitoring

• Representative surveillance sites like FoodNet
• Expert elicitation
• Food attribution
• Social media to collect illness data
• Foodborne disease outbreak investigations
• Determining root cause analysis
• Improved surveillance
• Estimating cases and burden of foodborne diseases
• Rapid communication of food contamination/food poisoning issues

Prevention and control strategies

• The role of food codes including Codex Alimentarius
• National and local standards, guidelines and regulations
• Industry association studies and recommendations
• Prerequisite programs/sanitation
• Hazard analysis critical control points
• Food Safety Objectives, Performance Objectives, etc.
• Novel pathogen inactivation methods
• Trend analysis/ statistical process control
• Traceback/blockchain along the food chain

Microbiological testing and identification

• Whole genome sequencing
• Culture independent diagnostic testing

The human element

• Food safety education and worker training
• Food safety culture and trust
• Understanding behavior of food preparers
• Exploring artificial intelligence

Risk analysis

• Quantitative microbiological risk assessment
• Qualitative risk assessment
• Risk profiles
• Predictive modeling
• Dose response assessment
• Exposure assessment
• Risk management
• Risk communication
• Future of the risk assessment process