Bob Whitaker
Chief Science Officer
Produce Marketing Association
Q. What's the latest update on the listeria outbreak?
A. At this point, it's probably safe to say it's in its wind-down stages right now. I'm not aware that there have been any announcements of additional illnesses or deaths in a couple of weeks. With listeria that's a good sign because it has a longer onset; you don't necessarily get sick within 24, 36, 72 hours like you do with a lot of pathogens.
This has been a tragedy on many levels. Certainly one of the levels is the characteristic of this disease is you have to wait a long time before you can feel comfortable saying the outbreak has passed so you can start looking back to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Q. How is PMA addressing the situation?
A. At PMA during this, we have been working with our members. One of the things that you often see when there's something of this scope is a flurry of activity. What we want to do is make sure we move based on facts and do the prudent thing.
We're working with members to explain what the data means as it comes out — as a translator role. We also talk with various stakeholders who deal with the cantaloupes on both the buying side and supplying side to make sure we're dealing with facts and science all the way through.
In the past, a lot of information came from trade associations, but today everything is so instantaneous that there's a new role to be played: take what information is there and sort through it to work with regulatory agencies and digest what's happening.
I'm working through the Center for Produce Safety (of which PMA was one of the founders in 2007), as chairman of technical committee and work closely with Bonnie Fernandez. One of the things we heard first from the growing community — specifically growers who were not involved who found there was no market for their products due to the fallout from the cantaloupes causing this illness — was that they wanted to know about any research.
Q. Tell me a little bit the Center for Produce Safety's upcoming meeting.
A. This triggered our thoughts at CPS. We thought that there was a real opportunity at CPS to convene a symposium. The idea would be to get decision makers on retail, foodservice, buying side and also growers around western hemisphere that grow cantaloupes to sit down and look at the food safety issues that had arisen around cantaloupes. The listeria outbreak in September/October is the most severe manifestation of this issue, but we have seen periodically in this country, principally, infestations of salmonella. Periodically in the last decade, we've seen contaminations that resulted in illnesses or have been discovered through testing programs — especially in winter/early spring months. We thought the time might be right to put this group of people together to look at what do we know, what don't we know, what can we do to get better going forward.
We scheduled a meeting that we put together pretty quickly for Jan. 11. We had to limit and do this by invitation, and I see this as a tipping point to other activities going forward. We'll have speakers who will give us the state of the art of what we know about cantaloupes and food safety and use it as a baseline to get everyone on the same level.
We then use this to evaluate and look at food safety guidance documents, commodity-specific guidance. I believe the cantaloupe groups were one of the first to come out with guidance documents in 2005. Let's take a look at that and see how the science has changed, how our knowledge has changed to talk about what we can do to be better. The industry as a whole has had a lot of experience since 2005 in putting together guidance documents. They've become more specific, more measurable over time.
Another interesting part would be to look at emerging technologies and how we train people. Guidance is part of that equation. The other part of the equation is research — and what do we know and what don't we know in determining what our research needs are.
As we've seen with other CPS activities over the last four years, putting researchers and producers and sellers of produce together is a good idea. There is an exchange of ideas. When you put them together, what we've witnessed repeatedly is the ideas start to come out and the researchers have a better appreciation of the exact practices and the exact level of technology that already exist, so you get a much better research proposal that is more focused on testing and experimenting around the actual practices that growers and shippers and processors use in delivering cantaloupes to the market. There's an interaction that needs to take place to get the best practices done.
Researchers need to access fields and fruit and compost and waters, as opposed to what you can do in a laboratory. You see collaboration, ownership. This event in January will be a catalyst in continuing some of this work.
The cantaloupe folks in California have been doing this for a number of years. They've been doing research with (University of California) scientists. Part of it will be to look at some of the research that's been done. It will be based on the research that's been done in Arizona and California. We're not starting at ground zero. There are other research groups who've done research that we'll be utilizing. There has been some very good work in this area that gives us a strong foundation to go forward. |
