Farm-to-table: A Situation Awareness Model for Food Safety Assurance for Porous Borders

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) was far more prescient to the situation of food safety today than we dare to consider. When people are seduced rather than compelled to live in harmony, evil is not so obvious because no one is looking. In the instance of food safety, changes in world trade, consumer demand for variety, and an increasingly complex regulatory system create challenges to effective vigilance and mitigation. It remains a critical reality that in any “farm-to-table” scenario, multiple sources, suppliers, and steps along the process pose a threat to the safety of the product. Here we discuss the effect of “porous borders” with reference to spread of disease and bio-threats to food fabrication practices and regulatory agencies. We show that understanding correspondences between the morphology of global food production and product tracing/tracking technologies are critical to the real-time performance of situation awareness prediction systems. Our reconstruction of the events associated with securing safe food opens a pathway to advancing the primitives necessary for an appropriate real-time knowledge-sharing system for start-to-finish data sources that assist detection/prediction assurance models. More than a hundred years ago, Rudolf Virchow first proposed the idea of “one medicine,” basing his conclusions on work with zoonotic diseases and his observations of the ease with which etiologic agents could move from animals to humans and back again (Brown 2000). For several reasons we are seeing an emergence of pleiotropic effects—on animals, the environment, and the health of humans—both directly, through the transfer of zoonotic agents, and also indirectly, through the potential compromise of the food supply (Brown 2000). Some of these reasons include the overall increase in global human population. With domestic sprawl, habitat destruction, and fragmentation, we have seen the aggregation of wild animals (particularly migrating species that can harbor disease) into smaller and isolated patches, increasing the contact rate within species and exposing animals and humans to potentially new pathogens. Avian influenza epidemics, such as the recent one (H7N7) in The Netherlands in 2003, caused 80 confirmed cases of human H7N7 influenza virus infection. In headline news as of February 23, 2005, World Health Organization officials urged governments “to act swiftly to control the spread of the bird flu, warning that the world is in grave danger of a deadly pandemic triggered by the virus” (WHO 2005). Symptoms include acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening condition with a 20% to 30% fatality rate. Because we also know the most toxic biological threats target the human respiratory system, it goes without saying that we must monitor for the emergence of possible zoonotic agents into our food supply (WHO 2005). “Firewalls” designed to prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases are not necessarily as effective as we would like to believe. In 1997, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued restrictions on animal feed to create a firewall against the spread of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), known commonly as Mad Cow Disease (Cohn 2004). The 1997 rule prohibits the feeding of ruminant (cattle, sheep, deer, goat) material to other ruminants, but allows the feeding of ruminant material to pigs and chickens, and rendered pig and chicken material to ruminants. The same 1997 rule also permits cattle blood, poultry litter, and salvaged pet food to be fed to cattle and other ruminants. Because BSE is spread through the feeding of rendered animal byproducts back to livestock, the FDA designed the 1997 regulations to address the risk of spreading the disease by clearly labeling animal feed that contains rendered cow, sheep, deer, and goat protein (FDA 2001). But in 2002, the General Accounting Office released a report finding serious flaws in the FDA’s inspection and review of animal feed renderers, manufacturers, feed haulers, and distributors (Center for Food Safety 2004). So, in fact, the firewall that the FDA has implemented to protect the American public from BSE is full of loopholes, and animal feed remains a route by which the MS 20040743 Submitted 11/10/04, Revised 1/2/05, Accepted 3/1/05. Author Lindberg is with Dept. of Architecture, Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, author Grimes is with Dept. of Electrical Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering, and author Giles is with School of Information Sciences & Technology, The Pennsylvania State Univ., Univ. Park, PA 16802. Direct inquiries and reprint requests to author Lindberg (E-mail: [email protected] or http://www.545architect.com).