Using chemical and DNA marker analysis to authenticate a high-value food, manuka honey.

Ensuring the authenticity of food is a rapidly emerging issue, especially in regard to high-value products that are marketed through increasingly complex global food chains. With the ever-increasing potential for mislabeling, fraud and adulteration, governments are increasingly having to invest in, and assure, the authenticity of foods in international trade. This is particularly the case for manuka honey, an iconic New Zealand food product. We show how the authenticity of a specific type of honey can be determined using a combination of chemicals derived from nectar and DNA derived from pollen. We employ an inter-disciplinary approach to evaluate a selection of authenticity markers, followed by classification modelling to produce criteria that consistently identify manuka honey from New Zealand. The outcome of our work provides robust identification criteria that can be applied in a regulatory setting to authenticate a high-value natural food. Our approach can transfer to other foods where assurance of authenticity must take into account a high level of natural variability.

Development of Food Safety Risk Assessment Guidelines for Foods of Animal Origin in International Trade †.

The international food safety environment is currently in a unique period of reevaluation and change. In an emerging trading environment regulated more according to food safety requirements than nontariff trade protection barriers, food safety risk analysis is pivotal to future Codex activities and implementation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement. Development of guidelines for food safety risk assessment requires determination of scope, internationally agreed definitions, general principles, guidelines tailored for each class of foodborne hazards, and linkages and interactions with risk management and risk communication. Food safety risk assessments need to be soundly based on science, should incorporate the four analytical steps of the risk assessment paradigm, and should be documented in a transparent and readily understandable form. The particular needs of Codex, the WTO, national governments, industry, and consumers need to be taken into account, and this includes identification of the essential linkages between risk assessment and the design of HACCP plans. With respect to chemical hazards in food, a risk assessment approach provides the opportunity to broaden the understanding of acceptable daily intakes, maximum residue levels, and their public health significance. Guidelines for chemicals in foods will inevitably have to address the differences between safety evaluation and a genuine risk assessment approach. With respect to microbiological hazards, the unique problems associated with risk assessment of living organisms in food make it likely that application of guidelines in the medium term will more commonly use qualitative approaches. In the absence of a history of safety evaluation according to a notionally zero risk baseline, as is the case with chemicals, the objective of microbiological risk analysis to reduce microbial risks to "the minimum which is technologically feasible and practical" represents a genuine focus for risk assessment. As risk assessment is increasing applied and internationally accepted guidelines become established, decision criteria for risk management arguably present the greatest challenge in establishing and maintaining quantitative SPS measures for food in international trade and judging their equivalence. However, the desire of all interested parties for scientifically justified food safety measures may be tempered according to the ability of the global scientific community to generate the necessary data and the political will to accept food safety programmes in different countries that have equivalent outputs.

Risk Assessment Model for Human Infection with the Cestode Taenia saginata.

A probabilistic risk assessment model was developed to estimate the risk to human health of Taenia saginata in the New Zealand cattle population. A standardized monitoring program was established to determine the number of suspect cysts detected during postmortem inspection and the scenario set was applied to risks in both the domestic and export markets. The mean number of human infections per year as a result of consumption in the export and the domestic market was estimated as 0.50 and 1.10 respectively. Estimations for expression of specific clinical symptoms were even less. In a scenario set where postmortem inspection procedures for T. saginata were not applied, the mean number of human infections per year was estimated to increase from 0.50 to 0.61 in the export market and from 1.10 to 1.30 in the domestic market. Given that T. saginata infection in humans results in mild and readily treatable symptoms, these risk estimates are extremely low on any scale of food-borne disease and bring the value of specific postmortem inspection procedures for T. saginata in the New Zealand situation into question. The Monte Carlo model developed to calculate these probabilities is presented here in detail to illustrate the potential of Monte Carlo methods for modeling risk.

Postmortem Meat Inspection Programs; Separating Science and Tradition.

Although a traditional approach to postmortem meat inspection dominates current programs, scientific evidence increasingly suggests that some practices are inappropriately focused. Allocation of inspection resources in modern meat production and processing systems should reflect a distribution according to risk, rather than a distribution according to the classical rules of meat inspection. Postmortem inspection procedures are not usually differentiated according to the class of livestock presented for slaughter, and they may be inappropriate to the spectrum and prevalence of diseases and defects present in a particular geographical region. A risk assessment model can provide the methodology for scientific evaluation of different postmortem inspection procedures, and allow the recognition of equivalent rather than replicated programs by international trading partners. The threat to human (and animal) health posed by various grossly evident diseases detectable by routine meat inspection procedures has been overemphasized relative to the threat posed by inadvertent microbiological contamination of the carcass and offals. The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point approach (HACCP) identifies and ranks microbiological and other hazards that can arise at each operational step in a food processing system and is a scientifically based system for process control. It has yet to be introduced as a formal method for regulatory control of slaughter and dressing. The networking of slaughterhouse information back to the farm enhances the preventative approach of HACCP.