304 Diet and Health
trying to promote a ‘second wave’ of food safety intervention but this time using a
risk-reduction management system known as Hazards Analysis Critical Control
Point (HACCP), an approach designed to build safety awareness and control of
potential points of hygiene breakdown into food handling and management sys-
tems. HACCP also encourages the creation of a ‘paper’ trail to enable tracking
along the production process, essential in order to obviate errors and enable learn-
ing. Breakdowns in food safety have in the past led to major political and business
crises, with governments under attack and new bodies responsible for food safety
being set up in many countries. As food supply chains become more complex and
as the scale of production, distribution and mass catering increases, so the chances
for problems associated with food contamination rise; mass production break-
downs in food safety spread contamination and pathogens widely. An outbreak of
Salmonellosis in the US in 1994, for example, affected an estimated 224,000 peo-
ple.^114 Listeria monocytogenes has a fatality rate of 30 per cent, a fact that seriously
dented UK public confidence in the ‘cook-chill’ and ‘oven-ready’ foods of the late
1980s.
Cross-border trade in agricultural and food products, as well as international
pacts have brought food safely to the fore.^115 The Director-General of the WHO,
in a speech on food safety to the UN Codex Alimentarius Commission, said: ‘glo-
balisation of the world’s food supply also means globalisation of public health
concerns’.^116 Crises over BSE, Salmonellosis and E. coli. for example, had had a
significant political impact throughout both the UK and EU, for instance,^117 and
many countries have experienced a fast rise in incidences of Salmonellosis and Campy-
lobacter infections since the 1980s, both bacteria being associated with meat and
meat products. Despite countries such as Denmark and Sweden having strict policies
governing the extermination of flocks and herds found to be carrying Salmonella, the
incidence continues through the contamination of feedstuffs, and in Denmark in
1998 the percentage of positive flocks with Campylobacter was 47.1 per cent.
Thus, in many developed countries with good monitoring systems, the inci-
dence of foodborne disease has in fact risen during the era of the Productionist
paradigm: in West Germany cases of infectious S. enteritis rose from 11 per 100,000
head of population in 1963 to 193 per 100,000 in 1990;^118 in England and Wales
formal notifications of the same disease rose from 14,253 cases in 1982 to 86,528
in 2000. These cases resulted in millions of days lost from work but, fortunately,
relatively few deaths.
Bacteria fill gaps left by nature, evolving new strains; but they are constantly
evolving even as science combats existing strains. The new food processes and sys-
tems of distribution ushered in by the food technology revolution of the second
half of the 20th century provided many opportunities for bacteria to develop and
colonize new niches. The incidence of Salmonella in the UK, for example, first
rose, and then, following good monitoring, hygiene intervention and political
pressure, fell right back – in two decades.
Table 13.14 gives a list from the WHO of some of the pathogenic organisms
that are associated with food and food hygiene: viruses, bacteria, trematodes