Foodborne Diseases-A Global Public Health Challenge

抄録

Food Safety has always been a very significant public health issue but its global importance has begun to be realized only in the last two or three decades. Not only has epidemiological surveillance shown a constant increase in the prevalence of foodborne illness, there have also been some large devastating outbreaks of diseases such as cholera, salmonellosis, enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli infections and hepatitis A in both developed and developing countries. Furthermore, cholera and other diarrhoeal diseases that were traditionally considered to be spread by water or person-person contact have been shown to be largely foodborne. During the early decades of the 21st century, foodborne diseases can be expected to increase further, especially, but not exclusively, in developing countries. The reasons being a number of environmental and demographic changes which are taking place now and will continue well into the next century. They vary from climatic changes, changes in microbial and other ecological systems, shrinking water supplies, increased age of human populations to globalization of food and feed trade and mass tourism. Meeting the huge challenge of food safety in the 21st century will be a major task of the public health community. It will require the application of new methods of identifying, monitoring and assessing of foodborne hazards, including the wide application of the hazard analysis and critical control point system. Both traditional and new technologies for assuring food safety should be improved and fully exploited. This needs to be done through legislative measures where suitable but much greater reliance will have to be placed on voluntary compliance and on education of consumers and other food-handlers. Indeed, this will be an important task of the Primary Health Care System aiming at “Health for all.”