Study hopes for results over the long term

The Food and Drug Administration’s multi-year study to enhance produce safety is taking the long view.

In November, the FDA announced a partnership with the California Department of Food and Agriculture; the University of California, Davis; Western Center for Food Safety, and agricultural stakeholders in the Central Coast of California to launch a multi-year longitudinal study to improve food safety. The study will foster enhanced understanding of the ecology of human pathogens in the environment that may cause foodborne illness outbreaks.

The launch of the study, the FDA said, followed a series of E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks in recent years linked to California’s leafy greens production regions, particularly three outbreaks that occurred in fall 2019.

Research teams will be collecting and examining samples from the environment including adjacent land, well and surface waters, soil inputs that include compost, dust and animal fecal samples.

Jennifer McEntire, vice president of food safety for the United Fresh Produce Association, said the multi-year longitudinal studies are extremely important.
She said the studies are not really looking at product, but rather the water, soil environment and seeking to get a sense of where these organisms reside and what the vectors of contamination may be. 

“It’s really a detailed attempt to gain a detailed understanding of the growing environment, the factors that we’ve hypothesized about, and put some data to them,” McEntire said.

The studies represent a long-term perspective that won’t stop the industry from putting in place new safety measures in the meantime.

“We can’t wait; we can’t say that we are going to do nothing, we’re not going to make any improvements until we have all the data several years from now,” she said. 

“But I do think that making the investment and taking the long view is ultimately going to be beneficial.”

In alignment with the FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety initiative, the agency said findings from the longitudinal study will contribute new knowledge on how various environmental factors may influence bacterial persistence and distribution in the region, and how those factors may impact the contamination of leafy greens.

The California study will examine how pathogens survive, move through the environment and possibly contaminate produce, through work with water quality, food safety, and agricultural experts from CDFA, the WCFS, representatives from various agriculture industries, and members of the leafy greens industry.