It's time to link science-based food safety standards with specific public health goals, says a report released today by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of the National Academies.
The 342-page report recommends the development of a national plan to integrate information on the prevalence of foodborne pathogens with data on the incidence of foodborne disease, according to a National Academies news release.
The report stresses the need to use up-to-date scientific tools and methods to develop food safety standards, such as the allowable prevalence of Salmonella contamination in broiler chickens. Food safety criteria should be "based on sound science, developed in a transparent manner, and consistently applied," Cameron Hackney, PhD, co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, stated in the news release. Hackney is dean of Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Consumer Sciences at West Virginia University in Morgantown.
