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MeetingFoodborne disease
Conference Room Document proposed by the World Health Organisation
2002Also available in:
No results found.Foodborne disease takes a major toll on health. Thousands of millions of people fall ill and many die as a result of eating unsafe food. Foodborne disease have implications both on health and development. Numerous outbreaks of foodborne disease have attracted media attention and raised consumer concern. However, the major problems are hidden among huge amounts of sporadic cases and smaller outbreaks. Most countries do not have good reporting systems, and a realistic estimation of the true burden of disease is difficult. WHO estimates 2,1 million deaths from diarrhoea worldwide, mainly caused by contaminated food and/or water. It is estimated that annually up to one third of the population, even in developed countries, suffer from foodborne disease. WHO initiatives to develop better methods to evaluate the foodborne disease burden, including strengthening foodborne disease surveillance, will serve to address this issue in the future. -
MeetingTerrorist Threats to Foods
Conference Room Document proposed by the World Health Organisation
2002Also available in:
No results found.The potential for terrorists to deliberately contaminate foods must be taken seriously. On 17 January 2002, the WHO Executive Board adopted a resolution (EB109.R5) that recognized the importance of safeguarding food in a global public response to the deliberate use of biological and chemical agents and radionuclear attacks to cause harm. Reducing these threats of sabotage will require an unprecedented degree of co-operation among health, agriculture, and law enforcement agencies of governments; the food industry and others in the private sector; and the public. Public health authorities must not only take the lead in surveillance and incident response for disease and other adverse public health events, they must also strongly support preventive measures along the entire food chain. A substantial involvement of the food industry and others in the private sector in the development and implementation of measures to prevent, detect, and respond to incidents of deliberate contamination is e ssential. Individual consumers must be aware of the potential for deliberate, as well as inadvertent, contamination in their procurement and preparation of food. -
Book (series)Report of the Expert Meeting on Ciguatera Poisoning
Rome, 19-23 November 2018
2020Also available in:
No results found.Phytoplankton blooms, micro-algal blooms, toxic algae, red tides, or harmful algae, are all terms for naturally occurring phenomena that have occurred throughout recorded history. About 300 hundred species of micro algae are reported at times to form mass occurrence, so called blooms. Nearly one fourth of these species are known to produce toxins. Even non-toxic algal blooms can have devastating impacts when they lead to kills of fish and invertebrates by generating anoxic conditions. Some algal species, although non-toxic to humans, can produce exudates that can cause damage to the delicate gill tissues of fish (raphidophytes Chattonella, Heterosigma, and dinoflagellates Karenia, Karlodinium) . Aquatic animals can suffer devastating mortalities, which could lead economical and food losses, and eventually became a food security problem. Of greatest concern to humans are algal species that produce potent neurotoxins that can find their way through shellfish and fish to human consumers where they evoke a variety of gastrointestinal and neurological illnesses (paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP), diarrhoeic shellfish poisoning (DSP), neurotoxic shellfish poisoning (NSP), azaspiracid shellfish poisoning (AZP) and ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP)). Worldwide, ciguatoxins are estimated to cause around 50 000 cases of ciguatera fish poisoning annually; neurological effects may last for weeks or even years and one percent of these cases are fatal . Climate change and costal water over enrichment create an enabling environment for harmful algal blooms, which seem to have become more frequent, more intense and more widespread in the past decades.
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