Emerging Biotechnologies to Promote Food Safety

We have seen a massive explosion in technologies, especially in molecular biology, that started affecting public health in the 0s and continues to accelerate. It’s a good time to discuss the impact that biotechnology will have on food safety, especially in my specialty of foodborne-disease surveillance. Many technologies—MALDI-time1 of flight mass spectroscopy, microarrays, sequencing, microfluidics, etc.,—are changing our concepts of microbial life, which is affecting how we detect and how we control microorganisms in their natural environments. Each year, one out of every six Americans—48 million people—are thought to become sick with a foodborne illness, and 3,000 die. I’ll provide background on foodborne-disease surveillance, and what it does for us, and on some of the limitations of surveillance and the impacts of technology. The main points I will make are: • Foodborne-disease surveillance is an important, but often overlooked, component of our food-safety system. • How well it functions—or doesn’t function—is vitally important to industry and to the public. • The current system operates at only a fraction of its potential. • New technology can exponentially magnify its effectiveness.