Foodborne Disease and Food Safety: What’s the Fit with Food Systems?
Each year, over 4 million Canadians develop a new infection because of the food they eat. Although many of these infections resolve without treatment, the associated costs are over $400 million annually, and serious consequences such as paralysis, miscarriage, chronic bowel impacts, and death can occur. In response, public health has evolved a set of activities aimed at identifying, and where possible preemptively intervening, at points across the food system where the microorganisms that cause foodborne disease could be introduced or multiply within food products. Ultimately, the goal of these food safety efforts is to minimize the potential for microbial contamination, growth, and transmission to people, particularly those who are vulnerable to severe consequences of infection.
This presentation will take a Canadian focus, and provide an overview of foodborne disease and current food safety activities. Key facets of the microbial world of foodborne pathogens will be highlighted, particularly as related to food production and handling at large and small scales. The goals of this presentation are to illustrate an important micro-scale facet of foods and food production - the dynamic and evolving realm of foodborne pathogens - and explore via discussion foodborne disease and food safety as both potential drivers and outcomes of foods and food systems.
Shannon is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems. She is an infectious disease epidemiologist who focuses on zoonotic diseases, which is really just a fancy way of saying she studies the occurrence, spread, and prevention of infections common to both animals and people. Her particular research area is food- and waterborne infections, such as Salmonella, E. coli O157, or - as you may have experienced lately! - Norovirus (aka ‘winter gastroenteritis’). These infectious agents live in the gut of humans and animals, and make people sick via the fecal-oral route of transmission, which is exactly as gross as it sounds. Needless to say, she is not asked to talk about her work at family dinners.
Prior to joining Waterloo in 2012, she spent a decade with the Public Health Agency of Canada investigating the impacts of foodborne disease in Canada and globally. Drawing on this experience, her other research focus is on how we do public health, including how we make optimal population health decisions in the face of complexity, and competing health and other outcomes.