FOOD SAFETY, SECURITY, AND BIOTERRORISM: IS IT ALL A SCARE TACTIC?

FOOD SAFETY, SECURITY, AND BIOTERRORISM: IS IT ALL A SCARE TACTIC?

Introduction

Food safety encompasses the hygienic handling, preparation, and even the storage of food in ways that ensure its safety as far as consumption is concerned. Bioterrorism, on the other hand, refers to the ways and techniques of converting safe food to bad food that becomes unfit for consumption. This paper attempts to establish a connection between food safety and security versus bioterrorism. The above will be achieved by succinctly looking into the following three key areas:

Elements of Food Security

According to Schmidhuber and Tubiello (2007), four salient features of food security helps ensure the safety of food for consumption; these are: availability of food, stability of the food, utilization of the food and access to food. Availability as an element sees to it that issues, such as starvation are non-existence. Additionally, this element plays a crucial role in ensuring that issues such as struggling for food are also non-existent. The second is stability that ensures there is a constant supply of food to all in sufficient quantities. It is this concept that ensures the element of availability is attained since the two are reliant on each other. Utilization is another element that ensures that food is put to proper use by preventing wastage or using for a non-intended purpose.  Access is another element that ensures that all people can access the specific amount of safe food without any barriers that would prevent them from the access. This element also assists in doing away with the issue of discrimination as far as attaining the required amounts of healthy foods is concerned by ensuring that all have access to the healthy food they require and in sufficient quantities.

Case Studies of Bioterrorism in Food

A perfect case study of bioterrorism in food is the case in the 1980s, where the Uniroyal Chemical Company manufactured the Alar Chemical that was meant to enable fewer apples to rot and fall (Tauxe, 2006). The Alar Chemical later proved to be fatal as it resulted in the cancer disorder of the lungs and kidney. The chemical was later proven to be a mistake in the food industry. This case demonstrates that the bioterrorism in food was a mistake and, as a result proving that the case of bioterrorism in food is not meant to scare any individual, but is a mistake that requires rectification.

Another case scenario where the bioterrorism is evident according to Sobel, Khan, and Swerdlow (2002) is in the United States in 1984, in the Dalles region in Oregon, where members of a religious cult contaminated around five salad bars with Salmonellaenteritidis serotype typhimurium that caused 751 people to become ill over a period of three months before it was noticed.  Additionally, in 1996, in the regions of Los Angeles in the United States of America, laboratory workers had used food that was contaminated with Shigella to infect other colleagues accidentally. The case of the religious cult infecting the 751 people were meant to act as scare tactics as far as scaring the citizens of the United States is concerned. The latter case of laboratory workers infecting other colleagues was an accidental type. These two cases prove that bioterrorism is both a scare tactic and an accidental type. Bioterrorism in food is usually meant to be a scare tactic used by the members of the terrorist organization to instill fear in the citizens of another country or the members of a given organization. However, there are cases when the event can be a mistake and thus does not count as a scare tactic, as in the case of laboratory workers infecting others given above.

Ways of Curbing Bioterrorism in Food

According to a book by Rasco and Bledsoe (p. 136, 2004), some of the techniques that can be employed to counter the bioterrorism in the food industry are: raising awareness by different bodies like the United States of America, coming up with screening procedures and even coming up with response procedures. The awareness can be made by bodies like the Department of Interior, Agriculture (USDA), Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), or even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The awareness should be made to the public on issues like the perfect ways by which the public can preserve their foods to assist in avoiding the contamination of such foods and on the different policies that the public could employ in avoiding food contamination.

Another way through which bioterrorism in the food industry could be mitigated, according to Rasco and Bledsoe (p. 136, 2004), is coming up with screening procedures and tools that could easily identify a foreign and harmful material in a food substance. The above could prove to be crucial as it would easily identify a pathogen in food and thus enabling the removal of that particular pathogen.

Coming up with response procedures (Rasco and Bledsoe, p.136, 2004) is another technique that could prove to be crucial as far as dealing with the bioterrorism in food is concerned. This would be applicable by incorporating medical teams that would respond quickly to cases of food bioterrorism.

Conclusion

In conclusion, bioterrorism in food is an issue that organizations and countries should join hands to get rid of as it causes numerous instabilities in a country. Moreover, bioterrorism in food is often meant to be a scare tactic that is used by a terrorist organization to cause panic. However, bioterrorism in food can also act as a mistake, especially in cases when chemicals are mistaken to be fit for various food products. Whether intentional or not, bioterrorism in food is an issue that cripples the food industry and that is what makes is the highest level of threats to the food industries; therefore, health organizations, countries and even the individuals themselves should try all things possible to eliminate the bioterrorism in the food through ways like raising awareness by the health organizations on the best ways eliminate the bioterrorism in the food.

References

Rasco, B. A., & Bledsoe, G. E. (2004). Bioterrorism and food safety. CRC Press.

Schmidhuber, J., & Tubiello, F. N. (2007). Global food security under climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(50), 19703-19708.

Sobel, J., Khan, A. S., & Swerdlow, D. L. (2002). Threat of a biological terrorist attack on the US food supply: The CDC perspective. The Lancet, 359(9309), 874-880.

Tauxe, R. V. (2006). Addressing foodborne threats to health: Policies, practices and global coordination. Workshop summary.