Contamination Control

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Approximately six out of every 10 companies in the Netherlands are not correctly providing food allergen information for non-prepacked products, according to the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA).

The University of Illinois, Cornell University, and Perdue Farms are partnering on a project to study policy and management approaches to further reduce Salmonella cases linked to raw poultry.

Further underlining the pertinence of mitigating the growing global public health threat posed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR), recent research revealed 40 percent of Spanish supermarket meat samples to be contaminated with multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli.

The World Health Organization of the United Nations’ (WHO’s) new manual, Five Keys for Safety Traditional Food Markets: Risk Mitigation in Traditional Food Markets in the Asia-Pacific Region, provides guidance on the implementation of five keys to promote public health and safety in the context of food safety, zoonotic diseases, and infectious respiratory diseases.

Dietary exposure to bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used in food packaging, is a health concern for consumers across all age groups, according to a reevaluation conducted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The agency significantly lowered the tolerable daily intake (TDI) for BPA.

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) research enterprise in Singapore, the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), are conducting research to aid the development of nanosensor technology for the detection of foodborne bacteria.

Similar to the gut microbiome, foods have a diverse community of indigenous or native microbes that reside on a food product. These microbes are influenced by changes in temperature, salinity, pH, oxygen, and exposure to other organisms, resulting in shifts in the bacterial population proportions. These dynamics can be further influenced by adding new bacteria—or bacteria already present in greater proportions—to help influence and improve food safety and quality. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS) has announced two upcoming public meetings of the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF) and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection (NACMPI).

A new guidance document from ILSI Europe on the existing approaches for analyzing Non-Intentionally Added Substances (NIAS) from different food contact materials has been released. 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a letter reminding developers and manufacturers of new plant varieties intending to transfer genes for proteins that are food allergens into new plant varieties used for food of the relevant legal requirements for such products.