COST OF IGNORING A TECHNOLOGY-THE CANADIANS ARE PAYING FOR IT

What type of logic it is that what is good for Americans is not good for Canadians? That seems to be essence of the continued refusal or obfuscation on the part of Canadian safety authorities to allow irradiation process for sterilization of ground meat products. Ionizing radiation generated under controlled conditions is directed to the foods to be sterilized in a closed atmosphere for varying duration, the time and dosage varying from product to product. Damage to the DNA of the pathogenic organisms is beyond repair making them incapable of multiplication, eventually leading to their death. In spite of significant consumer perception that irradiated food will emit harmful radiation affecting their health, persistent consumer education has enabled the industry to process over half a million tons of food products every year using irradiation technology. Almost 50 countries have permitted food irradiation with all international agencies including FAO and WHO certifying the safety and efficacy of food irradiation process. If this is so why should the Canadian government is prevaricating on this issue? Here is a report on this issue coming from Canada.

"Why has the Canadian government not approved the irradiation of ground beef to allow consumers the choice of buying regular or irradiated ground beef?In March 1998 the Canadian Cattlemen's Association (CCA) submitted a petition to Health Canada and according to a 2000 press release it was very optimistic that approval would happen in a timely fashion. This was a reasonable expectation by the Association because in 1997 on the basis of extensive scientific studies and the expert opinions in the United States, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the irradiation of red meat for the control of food borne pathogens. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) which is responsible for ensuring that meat products are safe, wholesome and properly labelled published its ruling in 1999. "Today Americans are consuming about 18 million pounds of irradiated red meat per year, and experiencing a rapidly growing demand to over 35 million pounds of fresh irradiated produce", according to Ron Eustice the former Executive Director of the Minnesota Beef Council. In fact for years, pioneering companies Omaha Steaks, Schwan's and Wegmans are proud to offer their customers a choice with the added food safety benefit that irradiation offers to already great-tasting beef products and hamburgers. Meanwhile in Canada we wait, denied the choice that American consumers have. Why? In the Canadian Report of the Independent Investigator into the Listeriosis Outbreak (July 2009) where 22 lives were lost, it noted "Irradiation has been proven to be the single most effective method of eradicating bacteria and it does not alter appearance, taste or texture of foods.". Yet it also stated that "Despite its many advantages, this proven technique is unlikely to be adopted by food processors without a major consumer education program." The Consumers Association of Canada commissioned a study to take the pulse on the subject of food irradiation early in 2012. While irradiation is relatively unknown in Canada, Angus Reid Public Opinion found, when Canadians polled in the survey were given a brief explanation of the process, most said they would support having irradiated food at the grocery store as a choice. The problem is that as few as 10 highly infectious E. coli O157:H7 microscopic germs can sicken and, perhaps, kill you. The manufacturing facility may be as clean as a surgical suite, and the government inspected company can take extensive samples— yet we are missing a kill step for the pathogens. So, where is the irradiated beef? Without the Canadian government approval, irradiation technology, which could have prevented economic harm to the food industry and could have prevented illness and death, cannot be used!"

The American policy of permitting the use of Irradiation Technology but insisting on declaration of the same on the label, probably, will be a via solution for this Catch 22 situation. World over use of irradiation technology must be encouraged because of its immense potential to prevent food losses and food poisoning episodes due to newly emerging virulent spoilage vectors. After all world has seen billions of dollars of investment in evolving and safety clearance of hundreds of irradiated products during the last 6 decades and this effort should not go waste by a continued mindset of resistance to the universal deployment of this clean technology. That will, to some extent, give salvation to the souls of all those who perished from the first atomic bomb dropped in Japan during World War II, thereby demonstrating the will of the mankind to use atomic energy only for peaceful uses that benefit it.

V.H.POTTY
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THE NEW PASTEURIZATION "DEBATE"-WHO IS RIGHT?

In spite of enormous progress achieved in the field of food technology there are still some gray areas where clarity is some what vague. One such area is pasteurization, meaning of which is understood differently by different agencies involved in food safety. Of course originally it was used almost exclusively by the dairy which used the thermal death time of common pathogenic bacteria to process fluid milk before marketing under refrigerated conditions. While pasteurization confers limited shelf life, even at low temperatures to fluid products, sterilization is the chosen method using higher temperatures to achieve longer life for food products at ambient temperatures. Recent controversy, regarding the claim by the meat industry that it is pasteurizing its products and therefore must be allowed to declare the same for boosting the confidence of the consumer regarding the safety of these products, must be resolved based on scientific interpretation of the term pasteurization.

"Technologies have emerged that allow for the pasteurization of certain meat and poultry products, and the term 'pasteurized' best describes these products to consumers," said NAMP executive director Phil Kimball, in a recent association news update. NAMP cites a U.S. National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF) definition of pasteurization: "Any process, treatment, or combination thereof, which is applied to food to reduce the most resistant microorganism(s) of public health significance to a level that is not likely to present a public health risk under normal conditions of distribution and storage." The petition asks that FSIS approve immediately the use of the term "pasteurized" on labels for certain categories of products, and to issue a communication clarifying its policy: "FSIS is legally required to accept the use of such terminology unless it can reasonably assert that the use of such a claim on a given label is either false or misleading ... Clearly that is not the case for products that are fully cooked or that have otherwise been processed in a manner that has effectively eliminated potential public health risks from pathogenic organisms, particularly when firms have validated this outcome."

Science is an evolving area where new discoveries are made at rapid pace and clinging to old concepts and practices will make the industry stagnant. After all the aim of pasteurization is to destroy pathogens and if this can be achieved by any technology that ensures product integrity and quality there should not be any objection. It is unfortunate that use of irradiation process, one of the most effective methods in destroying pathogens, is not adopted by the industry, probably fearing consumer backlash and loss of business, May be it is time that governments world over make it mandatory for highly perishable foods like fresh produce like salad vegetables and raw animal products to be irradiated in the interest of consumer safety.

V.H.POTTY
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FOOD IRRADIATION- TECHNOLOGY-INCREASED EFFICENCY

If there is ever a clean food preservation technology available to mankind, irradiation process eminently qualifies for that spot. Though many countries have approved irradiation as a safe process to kill bacteria and other pathogenic microorganisms that spoil food, its wide scale use at the industry level is constrained by many practical problems. As many a consumer identifies irradiation as related to the destructive and deadly "Hiroshima" bombs which killed and maimed thousands of people, there is an understandable reluctance to "accept" foods undergoing irradiation process. All governments are moving cautiously in this area and irradiation is slowly being used in some selected cases with large benefits flowing from it. It is against this background that new approaches are being tried out to reduce radiation doses as much as possible to allay the misplaced fears of some consumers. The recently reported use of modified atmosphere packing (MAP) in combination with irradiation seems to be achieving this purpose.

"A new research has developed a method, which could significantly reduce the amount of irradiation needed to kill 99.99 percent of Salmonella, E.coli and other pathogens on fresh produce. A team of Texas AgriLife Research engineers found that by packing produce in a Mylar bag filled with pure oxygen and her colleagues found they could almost half the amount of radiation needed to kill those pathogens. Reducing the amount of radiation is not so much a safety measure as it is a way to preserve quality of the produce, said Carmen Gomes, AgriLife research food safety engineer. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the use of irradiation at dosages of up to 4,000 Gray on leafy greens such as spinach, Gomes said. A Gray is a measure of ionizing radiation dose and it is equal to the absorption of 1 Joule of ionizing radiation by 1 kilogram of matter. "That dosage was determined as what was necessary to achieve an 100,000-fold reduction of such pathogens as E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella. However, we know based on previous research conducted by our group that above 1 kilo Gray (1,000 Gray) the quality of leafy vegetables starts to decay and they lose their freshness," noted Gomes. A 100,000-fold reduction corresponds to a 99.999 percent kill rate, according to Dr. Rosana Moreira, another member of the team".

Though the scientists claim that reducing the dosage serves a more useful purpose, viz. preserving the textural quality of crops like fresh greens, it is note worthy that a 50% lower dosage is able to achieve the same result when MAP is used before subjecting to irradiation process. Probably it is time for organizations like FAO, WHO and others to promote irradiation technology as the most important technique to prevent or reduce the massive food losses on a significant scale in the coming years. The logistics involved in making available low cost irradiation equipment must be addressed on priority so that majority of the industry can afford to establish the required facilities at minimum investment.

V.H.POTTY
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http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY FOR INCREASED YIELDS-CHINESE EFFORTS

Radiation invariably evokes hostile reaction amongst common folks even 65 years after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans to bring World War II to an end. The massive destruction and suffering in these cities of Japan are still fresh in the memories of older generation of population while the younger generation have the visuals easily accessible to them through the Internet. There is a lurking suspicion that food exposed to irradiation would carry harmful radiations that will be hazardous. No matter how much proof is generated establishing the safety of irradiation process, the consumer resistance to accepting irradiated foods is still high, acting as hindrance for universal acceptance of this beautiful technology by the industry. It is against such a background one has to view the daring developments in China during the last 30 years where scientists have been experimenting with nuclear radiation for improving the genetic stock of their food grains for increasing their yield.

"China is conducting experiments to apply nuclear technology to improve the yield of agricultural produce encouraging farmers to cultivate various varieties of irradiated seeds, which involves exposing them to low doses of gamma rays. Some of the Chinese farmers have sown the seeds irradiated by Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences (HAAS) and are monitoring the growth of the crop. "I just want to try it. I hope nuclear technology can help me to raise either the output or quality of crops," Li Weiguo says a farmer in Shuqing Village near Shuangcheng City, who had sown the irradiated seeds soybean and corn this summer, expecting new varieties with higher yields. It is the first time the 33-year-old farmer in China's Heilongjiang Province has had seeds irradiated with the help of agricultural experts. The irradiation process involves exposing seeds to low doses of gamma rays from cobalt-60, a radioisotope of cobalt, which causes changes in the seed's genetic makeup, said Xu Dechun, vice director of the institute. It usually took experts about five years to screen out seeds for new varieties with stable genetic characteristics, Xu told Xinhua news agency".

"Compared with the widely used cross-breeding method, which largely depended on opportunity and usually took about eight years to get a stable variety, seed irradiation intervention was far more effective in bringing out the desired characteristics of a certain crop, he said. Xu's team has developed 28 new soybean breeds, almost 20 wheat varieties and a dozen corn varieties. More than seven million hectares of farmland in Heilongjiang have grown such crops, which raised yields by more than 50 million kilograms. China is the world's largest grain producer and consumer. The central and local governments have been supporting the application of nuclear technologies in agricultural development. Huge investments have been made in research programs across the country and almost every province has established atomic energy institutes, Liang Qu, director of the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, said at the third Global Forum of Leaders for Agricultural Science and Technology. The FAO and IAEA had continuously promoted the application of nuclear technologies in agriculture since 1950, he said. So far, more than 3,000 new varieties have entered mass production worldwide for commercial purposes. In addition to developing new varieties, irradiation is also used to retard spoilage and increase the shelf life of food".

While changes in gene make up with in a species are not considered very risky, consumer backlash is more towards transgenic crops where external genes are introduced into the natural gene pool of a particular cultivar. Genetic changes are brought about naturally amongst each species by a natural process of evolution but probably it may take long time. Green revolution was achieved through cross breeding using high performance strains which expedited the genetic change to achieve several desired traits. While leadership role of China has to be conceded which was possible because of the nature of government in charge there, the positive results reported by them should persuade others like India to give more priority to application of nuclear technology to agriculture.

V.H.POTTY

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IRRADIATION TECHNOLOGY-MEAT INDUSTRY DEMANDS

Gamma radiation for food preservation has been a subject matter of scientific research for more than 50 years and it has been more or less agreed by scientists and the industry that it is a safe method of keeping food safe for considerable length of time without fear of risks associated with pathogenic microorganisms. Effective and safe dosage of radiation, optimum for each food has also been worked out based on international consensus. However wide scale use of this 'clean' technology is constrained by two factors. First there is a misconceived notion amongst the consumers about possible residual radiation left in the product after processing though hundreds of studies have clearly ruled out such a possibility. Second, irradiation facilities are not easily available to the industry as the capital investment is very heavy and handling radiation sources is tightly controlled by the governments due to possible misuse by unsocial elements in the society.

A non technical issue which is mired in controversy is the insistence by many governments to declare on the label of products irradiated for the consumer to know about it whereas industry is resisting such a move fearing possible consumer back-lash. "Since 1999, FSIS has permitted the use of ionizing radiation for treating meat, meat byproducts, and certain meat food products so long as labels disclose the product is irradiated. But putting radiation labels on food has not gained consumer acceptance. AMI's request is different in that it wants to allow low-dose e-beam radiation over the surface of chilled carcasses as a processing aid and not disclose that the meat has been irradiated on labeling". Probably industry has a case as the technology used is is based on low radiation electronic beam which is considered innocuous.

Considering that pathogen related food poisoning is on the increase, especially in meat based foods, a rational decision needs to be taken and not acceding to the pleas of the industry could prove to be counter productive. This is especially true in countries like India where hygiene and sanitation standards and environmental quality are very poor and irradiation technology only can help to reduce the incidence of food borne diseases significantly.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com