By Amanda Garris<\/p>\n
When Charles Bashiru Bakin conducted food safety audits of small businesses as a regulatory officer for Ghana\u2019s Food and Drugs Authority, he learned firsthand one of the core dilemmas in food safety: Where do you start, and why?<\/p>\n
\u201cFood safety decisions tend to be really complex, because food safety is a big issue,\u201d says Bakin. \u201cHow to make these decisions is often a bit challenging. Where do you allocate resources, finances, and personnel?\u201d<\/p>\n
He also glimpsed a possible solution in the large amounts of data collected by regulatory agencies during inspections, investigations of consumer complaints, and food safety surveillance activities. He wondered if these data could be leveraged to identify priority steps in the food system where better practices would have the greatest impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cData is constantly being generated from the food system,\u201d says Bakin. \u201cI wanted to know how we can engage in the analysis of all this data to provide an information basis on which food safety regulatory agencies or food companies can make decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Bakin is a Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University (OSU) and helping to implement a data-driven approach to reducing foodborne pathogens in poultry raised by female and youth farmers in Kenya. In the Chakula Salama project\u2014which means \u201csafe food\u201d in Kiswahili\u2014researchers at OSU, the Kenya Medical Research Institute, and the University of Nairobi are using data analytics and risk analysis to reduce foodborne illness in this dietary staple. Because of the demographics of small-scale poultry production, the project is also poised to support entrepreneurship among women.<\/p>\n
\u201cPoultry farming is quite big in Kenya, and very often it’s women who are engaged in poultry farming, because of the quick turnaround,\u201d he says. \u201cYou find that a lot of women pick it up as a source of income.\u201d<\/p>\n
The farmers in Kenya face the same food safety challenges that impact poultry farmers around the world. Threats include Salmonella, which is the leading cause of death from foodborne disease in Africa, and Campylobacter, considered to be the most common bacterial cause of human gastroenteritis. Bakin and colleagues hope that by helping farmers strengthen food safety practices, they can prevent those illnesses and empower female farmers as food-safety champions and entrepreneurs. And although Bakin finds himself with the same question\u2014where to start\u2014 this time, the data is leading the way.<\/p>\n
The first step is assessing the prevalence of foodborne pathogens that are occurring with farmers\u2019 existing practices, a project for the team this summer and fall. After the implementation of risk-based interventions which were selected collaboratively during a three-day risk-ranking workshop with producers and researchers, the assessment will be repeated to determine how effective the interventions are.<\/p>\n
\u201cBasically, if the interventions are effective, we will see a decline in the prevalence and the concentrations of these pathogens in the poultry,\u201d says Bakin.<\/p>\n
Effective data-driven food safety practices and policies will position the work to be scaled up in other locales. In addition to this focus on food safety on small farms, Bakin will be using data to understand the level of risk across Kenya\u2019s poultry production, processing, transport, and marketing networks to locate the key contamination points affecting consumers\u2019 risk of foodborne disease.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will conduct a risk assessment to estimate the risk associated with the consumption of food,\u201d he says. \u201cFor example, anytime you eat unsafe food, you could either fall sick, and if you fall sick, you might just have some minor abdominal pain or throw up, or in the worst-case scenario, you could end up in a hospital or die as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are using mathematical models to assess risk across the entire value chain of food products, from farm to fork,\u201d he explains. \u201cWe are modeling what the outcomes would be in terms of microbial growth, or microbial inactivation along this process, including steps like cold chain and transportation to markets. With risk assessment, we can answer the question, if you could implement an intervention along the value chain, where would it have the most impact?\u201d<\/p>\n
Amanda Garris is a communications specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Amanda Garris When Charles Bashiru Bakin conducted food safety audits of small businesses as a regulatory officer for Ghana\u2019s Food and Drugs Authority, he learned firsthand one of the core dilemmas in food safety: Where do you start, and why? \u201cFood safety decisions tend to be really complex, because food safety is a big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-researcher-profiles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1244"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1249,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244\/revisions\/1249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}