Although the Canadian food safety program is ailing, the government can fix its problems with substantial effort and investment, according to one researcher.
The biggest problem is Canada’s inadequate foodborne illness surveillance program. “We are reliant on managing risks of pathogenic bacteria in foods on data from other countries,” said Richard A. Holley, PhD, professor of microbial ecology of food spoilage; meat, poultry, dairy; food safety at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.
Without a national foodborne illness surveillance system, “we’re walking in a fog,” Dr. Holley told Food Quality. “We can’t accurately determine whether or not foodborne illness from ice cream occurs more frequently than it does from fried chicken wings. And we don’t know what organisms are more frequently involved.”
“The Canadian Food Inspection Agency [CFIA] concurs that timely and complete data is critical to foodborne illness surveillance and foundational to strengthening food safety approaches,” spokesperson Jenn Gearey told Food Quality. CFIA is the national food inspection authority in Canada. The organization administers the Consumer Packaging and Labeling Act as it relates to food and has de facto responsibility for all food inspection.
The Canadian food safety system is plagued with other problems. The system is reactive, not proactive, and underreporting of illness is rampant, Dr. Holley wrote in an analysis for the Canadian Medical Association Journal. It only monitors food- and waterborne illness outbreaks that researchers suspect based on information from other countries, which represents only about 10% of foodborne illness cases.
When it comes to direct prevention of foodborne illnesses, Canada’s record is poor, Dr. Holley said. In a comparison of reported rates of foodborne illness caused by Escherichia coli 0157:H7, Dr. Holley found that 80% of the 36 countries he studied had fewer E. coli cases than Canada; 30% had fewer cases of salmonellosis and campylobacteriosis.
Fragmented System
Another issue is what Dr. Holley called “multijurisdictional fragmentation.” Currently, a patchwork of regional systems handles foodborne illness surveillance, an approach that results in poor interagency collaboration, cooperation, and information exchange among federal, provincial, territorial, and regional governments as well as between agriculture and health, he said. Inspectors at the various levels follow different regulations and receive different training.
“We do suffer from lax investments in foodborne illness surveillance, a lack of a uniform set of inspection guidelines across those three levels of government, and an inability to have these agencies at those various levels work together in times of crisis.”
Food inspection is another issue. “The reality is, you can’t inspect safety into food; you have to build it into food,” Dr. Holley said. Smarter inspections, not more inspections, are the key to improving food safety.
Changes Needed
According to Dr. Holley, fixing the Canadian food safety program requires:
• Establishing a national foodborne illness surveillance program that would identify the foods and organisms that are the most common causes of illness.
• Reworking the interface among the various levels of government charged with food safety as well as those in agriculture and health. “These memoranda of understanding that have been developed over the years don’t work, and so this is an issue that goes to the constitution of the country,” he said.
• Using data from the surveillance program to develop uniform inspection policies based on risk.
• Determining where the organisms originate, namely, the farm. In particular, it is critical to halt the contamination, by tainted animal feed, of the animals we eat. n
ontaminated Chicken Linked to Urinary Tract Infections
Results raise important public health issues
Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have found new evidence that eating Escherichia coli-contaminated chicken can cause urinary tract infections (UTIs).
These results raise important public health issues, primary author Amee Manges, PhD, MPH, told Food Quality. The first issue is “that E. coli transferred in food—which we usually think of as causing diarrhea—may actually be responsible for many UTIs and other infections outside the gut. [The second issue is] that these E. coli may be resistant to antibiotics, due to use in food animal production.” Dr. Manges is an assistant professor in the department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill.
Lee W. Riley, MD, professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases, University of California, Berkeley, said this is an important study because it “clearly shows that E. coli strains found in common food can cause extra-intestinal infection, such as UTI. That is, E. coli that causes human illness is not just limited to those that cause diarrhea.”
Acquired From a Common Source
The researchers’ previous work revealed that some women were developing UTIs due to the same E. coli strain. “Usually you see this kind of pattern of infections with the same strain in disease outbreak settings. So we thought that maybe these women were acquiring their E. coli from a common source; the most likely candidate was food.”
Dr. Manges and colleagues collected E. coli isolates from study participants, restaurant/ready-to-eat foods, and retail chicken in the Montreal area between 2005 and 2007. They collaborated with the Public Health Agency of Canada and the University of Guelph. Their results showed that some of the E. coli found in retail chicken meat was closely related to the E. coli that causes UTIs in humans.
Eating E. coli-contaminated food does not directly cause a UTI, Dr. Manges said. “Once in the gut, the E. coli don’t cause any problems,” she said. “Then something happens to cause a UTI or other infection outside the gut. UTIs often occur in young women because they are sexually active. The mechanics of sex help move the E. coli from the gut” via the anus “to the vagina and urethra, leading to infection.”
Looking for Direct Evidence
Research on this topic is ongoing. “We are working to provide even more direct evidence of a link, if one exists, that these E. coli—extraintestinal E. coli—can be transferred via food,” Dr. Manges said. “If this is the case, we will also look at markers of drug-resistance to see if resistant E.coli are also transferred.”
More research must determine the extent of this problem. “The issue is how widespread is the UTI caused by foodborne E. coli? We don’t know since studies specifically looking at this question are recently being done,” Dr. Riley told Food Quality.
The difficult task is how to apply these results to food safety. Preventing food contamination by uropathogenic E. coli at the animal reservoir or food processing sites is challenging, Dr. Riley said. “One thing the food industry can do is to avoid using antibiotics as growth promoters. If this practice is stopped, we can at least prevent drug-resistant E. coli from spreading by food.”
James R. Johnson, MD, director, Infectious Disease Fellowship Program and professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, told Food Quality that there are a few other preventive approaches, including more hygienic food processing and distribution methods, irradiating foods, washing fruits and vegetables before consumption, careful kitchen hygiene, and thoroughly cooking meats.
