Food safety

Question

This piglix contains articles or sub-piglix about Food safety

Answer 1

List of foodborne illness outbreaks

This is a list of foodborne illness outbreaks. A foodborne illness may be from an infectious disease, heavy metals, chemical contamination, or from natural toxins, such as those found in poisonous mushrooms.

In 1999, an estimated 5,000 deaths, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 76 million illnesses were caused by foodborne illnesses within the US. Illness outbreaks lead to food recalls.

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Answer 2

Food safety

Food safety

Food safety is a scientific discipline describing handling, preparation, and storage of food in ways that prevent foodborne illness. This includes a number of routines that should be followed to avoid potentially severe health hazards. In this way food safety often overlaps with food defense to prevent harm to consumers. The tracks within this line of thought are safety between industry and the market and then between the market and the consumer. In considering industry to market practices, food safety considerations include the origins of food including the practices relating to food labeling, food hygiene, food additives and pesticide residues, as well as policies on biotechnology and food and guidelines for the management of governmental import and export inspection and certification systems for foods. In considering market to consumer practices, the usual thought is that food ought to be safe in the market and the concern is safe delivery and preparation of the food for the consumer.

Food can transmit disease from person to person as well as serve as a growth medium for bacteria that can cause food poisoning. In developed countries there are intricate standards for food preparation, whereas in lesser developed countries the main issue is simply the availability of adequate safe water, which is usually a critical item. In theory, food poisoning is 100% preventable. The five key principles of food hygiene, according to WHO, are:

Food safety issues and regulations concern:

ISO 22000 is a standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization dealing with food safety. This is a general derivative of ISO 9000. ISO 22000 standard: The ISO 22000 international standard specifies the requirements for a food safety management system that involves interactive communication, system management, prerequisite programs, HACCP principles.

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Answer 3

Food storage

This piglix contains articles or sub-piglix about Food storage

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Answer 4

List of foodborne illness outbreaks by death toll

This is a list of foodborne illness outbreaks by death toll, caused by infectious disease, heavy metals, chemical contamination, or from natural toxins, such as those found in poisonous mushrooms.

1996 1996 Wishaw E. coli outbreak E. coli O157 meat local butcher >200 20 At the time the world's deadliest outbreak of E. coli poisoning. Butchers John M. Barr & Son provided cooked meat products to several events including a birthday party and a pensioners' luncheon club. The source of the contamination was traced to a boiler used for cooking joints and stew, and a vacuum packing machine used for cooked and raw meats.[23]

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Answer 5

List of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States

In 1999, an estimated 5,000 deaths, 325,000 hospitalizations and 76 million illnesses were caused by foodborne illnesses within the US. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking outbreaks starting in the 1970s. By 2012 the figures were roughly 130,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths.

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Answer 6

Adulterant

An adulterant is a pejorative term for a substance found within other substances such as food, fuels or chemicals even though it is not allowed for legal or other reasons.

It will not normally be present in any specification or declared contents of the substance, and may not be legally allowed. The addition of adulterants is called adulteration. The most common reason for adulteration is the use by manufacturers of undeclared materials that are cheaper than the correct and declared ones. The adulterants may be harmful, or reduce the potency of the product, or they may be harmless.

The term "contamination" is usually used for the inclusion of unwanted substances due to accident or negligence rather than intent, and also for the introduction of unwanted substances after the product has been made. Adulteration therefore implies that the adulterant was introduced deliberately in the initial manufacturing process, or sometimes that it was present in the raw materials and should have been removed, but was not.

An adulterant is distinct from, for example, permitted food additives. There can be a fine line between adulterant and additive; chicory may be added to coffee to reduce the cost or achieve a desired flavour—this is adulteration if not declared, but may be stated on the label. Chalk was often added to bread flour; this reduces the cost and increases whiteness, but the calcium actually confers health benefits, and in modern bread a little chalk may be included as an additive for this reason.

In wartime adulterants have been added to make foodstuffs "go further" and prevent shortages. The German word ersatz is widely recognised from such practices during WW2. Such adulteration was sometimes deliberately hidden from the population to prevent loss of morale and propaganda reasons. Some goods considered luxurious in the Communist Bloc such as coffee were adulterated to make them affordable to the general population.

Adulterants added to reduce the amount of expensive product in illicit drugs are called cutting agents. Deliberate addition of toxic adulterants to food or other products for human consumption is poisoning.

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Answer 7

Adulterated food

Adulterated food is impure, unsafe, or unwholesome food. Incidents of food contamination have occurred because of poor harvesting or storage of grain, use of banned veterinary products, industrial discharges, human error and deliberate adulteration and fraud.

Historians have recognized cases of food adulteration in Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages. Contemporary accounts of adulteration date from the 1850s to the present day.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), regulates and enforces laws on food safety as well as Food Defense. The FDA provides some technical definitions of adulterated food in various United States laws.

"Adulteration" is a legal term meaning that a food product fails to meet federal or state standards. Adulteration is an addition of another substance to a food item in order to increase the quantity of the food item in raw form or prepared form, which may result in the loss of actual quality of food item. These substances may be other available food items or non-food items. Among meat and meat products some of the items used to adulterate are water or ice, carcasses, or carcasses of animals other than the animal meant to be consumed.

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FD&C) Act 2888) provides that food is "adulterated" if it meets any one of the following criteria:

Food also meets the definition of adulteration if:

Further, food is considered adulterated if:

The Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Poultry Products Inspection Act of 1957 contain similar provisions for meat and poultry products. [21 U.S.C. § 453(g), 601(m).

Generally, if a food contains a poisonous or deleterious substance that may render it injurious to health, it is considered to be adulterated. For example, apple cider contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 and Brie cheese contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes are adulterated. There are two exceptions to this general rule. First, if the poisonous substance is inherent or naturally occurring and its quantity in the food does not ordinarily render it injurious to health, the food will not be considered adulterated. Thus, a food that contains a natural toxin at very low levels that would not ordinarily be harmful (for instance, small amounts of amygdalin in apricot kernels) is not adulterated.

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Answer 8

Alcaligenes viscolactis

Alcaligenes viscolactis is a bacterium which can produce ropiness in milk and which can grow in sun tea.

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Answer 9

Antibacterial activity

The shelf life of a product can be extended either by adding artificial preservatives or by taking hygienic measures during the manufacturing process. As the consumer trend today is towards preservative-free foods with a long shelf-life, industry is being forced to rethink its manufacturing methods. Instead of adding preservative agents, increased hygienic precautions can be taken during production. A clean and hygienic manufacturing environment is an essential prerequisite in order to keep contamination-related reject rates low. The utilization of surfaces in the manufacturing environment with antibacterial properties can significantly reduce contamination risks.

The determination of the antibacterial activity (microbicidy) of surfaces is described in the following norms: ISO 22196 and JIS Z 2801. The Japanese norm JIS Z 2801 was published in 2000 and published again in 2007 as the internationally valid norm ISO 22196. Therefore, ISO 22196 and JIS Z 2801 are identical. In the test, both a surface system coated with sporicide and an identical surface system without an antibacterial coating are charged with selected microorganisms.

A once-only assessment of the reduction factor is carried out after 24 hours by determining colony counts on the reference surface and on the antibacterial surface.

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Answer 10

Aspartame controversy

The artificial sweetener aspartame has been the subject of several controversies since its initial approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1974. The FDA approval of aspartame was highly contested, with critics alleging that the quality of the initial research supporting its safety was inadequate and flawed and that conflicts of interest marred the 1981 approval of aspartame. In 1987, the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that the food additive approval process had been followed properly for aspartame. The irregularities fueled a conspiracy theory, which the "Nancy Markle" email hoax circulated, along with claims, counter to the weight of medical evidence, that numerous health conditions (such as multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus, methanol toxicity, blindness, spasms, shooting pains, seizures, headaches, depression, anxiety, memory loss, birth defects, and death) are caused by the consumption of aspartame in normal doses.

Potential health risks have been examined and dismissed by numerous scientific research projects. With the exception of the risk to those with phenylketonuria, aspartame is considered to be a safe food additive by governments worldwide and major health and food safety organizations. FDA officials describe aspartame as "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved" and its safety as "clear cut." The weight of existing scientific evidence indicates that aspartame is safe as a non-nutritive sweetener.

The controversy over aspartame safety originated in perceived irregularities in the aspartame approval process during the 1970s and early 1980s, including allegations of a revolving door relationship between regulators and industry and claims that aspartame producer G.D. Searle had withheld and falsified safety data. In 1996, the controversy reached a wider audience with a 60 Minutes report that discussed criticisms of the FDA approval process and concerns that aspartame could cause brain tumors in humans. The 60 Minutes special stated that "aspartame's approval was one of the most contested in FDA history."

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