As researchers and officials in government and industry develop and review
options to control food safety risks, they often find out that the available
data do not tell them all they need to know. An abundance of data exists,
but there are some areas where little information is known. Even where available,
making the data more accessible would aid efforts to use and disseminate
the information.
Two researchers with the Food Safety Consortium have been working on a project
to coordinate the data base and make it useful to people across several
disciplines. Helen Jensen, a professor of economics at Iowa State University,
and Tanya Roberts, a senior economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Economic Research Service, have conferred extensively with research and
policymaking personnel from the public and private sectors.
Jensen and Roberts found there are some basic problems to be addressed.
For example, there is a lack of agreement on how many cases of human illness
are caused by foodborne pathogens. Also, although reporting mechanisms exist
to collect information on consumer illnesses and on farm management practices,
there are no comparable mechanisms for collecting data at the processing
and retailing levels of the food chain.
One result of their efforts was publication of a USDA report they edited
entitled Tracking Foodborne Pathogens From Farm to Table, based on
the proceedings of a conference in Washington last year. It is one of the
first steps to bring various parties together to identify data needs and
integrate available data.
"Data on contamination that exist at the farm, the processing and the
distribution levels aren't very well coordinated," Jensen said of one
particular problem. "For example, there may not be standard codes that
allow us to take assignment by doctors or hospitals of diseases back to
whether (a case) is of food origin or not. Because we don't have that, we
don't really have very good information on food incidence. We can't trace
disease cases to food sources."
Jean Buzby, an agricultural economist at the University of Kentucky, presented
to the Washington conference a summary of current limitations in foodborne
disease research: a lack of accurate data on the incidence and severity
distribution of foodborne illness, a lack of medical cost data on foodborne
illnesses for which no medical care was sought, a lack of morbidity data
for foodborne illness episodes, and the underreporting of cases.
"Improving the completeness and quality of data sources will improve
estimates of foodborne illnesses, as will developing new data sources and
expanded electronic capabilities," Buzby said.
Jensen offered the scenario of someone who is diagnosed with a meat-related
illness. "It's hard to trace back to farm or processing source, or
mishandling food at home. So the integration of data is a problem. Some
of it is that we just don't have the data. So we're hoping through this
effort to work with agencies and other people who provide data to develop
a mechanism for integrating the data better."
The information that is reported in the news media can have a great impact
on determining research priorities, but access to relevant data can influence
research differently. If an outbreak of a particular disease related to
a food safety problem occurs and is widely reported, the public will be
influenced in its demands for safer food products.
"All of a sudden we turn from any of the other pathogens we might have
been looking at to E. coli because that's from where the contamination
came," Jensen said. "So that news and the way it was presented
may have a lot more influence on setting priorities for which pathogens
we're looking at or where we're targeting regulations than any academic
study that may have ranked them and said, 'Let's start here.'"
So would a better coordinated data base have a greater impact on setting
public policy? Jensen believes it would. "There's a lot of interest
at the federal government level on figuring out how to develop an integrated
risk assessment system, how you compare your sources and what's the most
effective way to reduce foodborne hazards. ... Government is recognizing
the importance of economic information in setting priorities. You need data
to do that."
A greater availability of better coordinated data would allow policymakers
to analyze a situation. They would realize that a particular outbreak may
be severe and become the object of major media attention at the moment,
but they would also know that the outbreak was unusual compared to other
problems and should be considered a lower priority when allocating research
resources to fight pathogenic bacteria, Jensen said.
Researchers need information about specific pathogens so they can determine
the most cost-effective strategies to control the pathogens in the specific
foods they contaminate. Data, Jensen explained, are used to identify problems
and to estimate the benefits and costs of solutions. So data should be collected
first for pathogens that pose the greatest problems and where the payoffs
from control are greatest. In defining solutions, researchers can determine
what the most cost-effective methods are and realize cost savings by directing
resources to developing the most efficient control methods.
The food production chain has several points from which data can assist
policymakers. "People doing research at the farm level have learned
a great deal about what's going on at the farm level but they haven't been
pushed to evaluate the difference between what happens at the farm level
and what happens at the processing level," Jensen said. "But as
we identify the linkages among the problems, public policy is now focusing
on trying to rank interventions or consider the choice of intervening at
the processing level or putting more resources at the consumer level or
going back to the farm level."
Researchers have been spending time since the Washington conference identifying
resources that are most useful to include in pathogen databases. "We
don't have a huge amount of resources to commit to generating new data but
we do have resources that we hope can make data more available to researchers
and public policy analysts," Jensen said.
"I think one of the developments over the last five years as we know
more about food safety problems is the very nature of the integration, the
fact that we need to know more about the way the system works at each point
in the food chain and not just focus on the one area which tends to be along
disciplinary lines," Jensen said. "That's why something like the
Food Safety Consortium is useful because it's interdisciplinary and involves
teams of people."