University News for September 8, 2010

A microbiologist with the University of Manitoba is calling for a proactive approach to monitoring foodborne illness and the foods that cause foodborne illness in Canada.

An E. coli outbreak in Winnipeg has been linked to food eaten at the Russian Pavilion at Folklorama during the first week of August.

Foodborne disease outbreaks account for about 10 percent of cases while the other 90 percent are sporadic.

Dr. Rick Holley, a food safety and food microbiologist with the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, says the approach we've taken is Canada is retroactive and we need to be proactive.

Clip-Dr. Rick Holley-University of Manitoba:
We need to go out in an active fashion such as they do in the United States to some extent using sentinel sites that monitor a segment of the population for the occurrence of both sporadic cases of foodborne illness and outbreak cases of foodborne illness.

In the U.S. they have a program called FoodNet that monitors the health of 44 million Americans in an active fashion where they have staff that go out and investigate illnesses that occur in small numbers as well as illnesses that occur as part of outbreaks.

Physicians are interviewed, patients are interviewed, samples are taken from patients both clinical samples and food samples and correlations are made between the food and the patient.

We're not doing that in Canada.

We, after the fact, go out and investigate the cause of the foodborne illness outbreak and as I've said it's really the minority of cases of foodborne illness outbreaks where we find out what it was that caused the problem and we're learning very little.

What was the sum total of what we learned about this E. coli outbreak presumably at the Russian pavilion at Folklorama?

Close to zero.

Dr. Holley believes a greater involvement in foodborne illness surveillance would provide the information necessary to develop approaches for dealing with the organisms that pose the greatest risk for foodborne illness and the foods that pose the greatest risk.

For UniversityNews.Org, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

*University News is a presentation of the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural & Food Sciences