A federal government pilot project in Waterloo, Ont., may provide part of the solution to Canada’s ‘passive’ food safety system.
C-Enternet began work in 2005 on taking food borne illness surveillance to another level.
The goal of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s program is to collect data on cases of salmonella poisoning and other food borne illnesses and determine how the pathogens got into the food system and then devise ways to prevent similar outbreaks in the future.
“The development of the program came out of recognizing the limitations of the surveillance that is currently available in Canada,” said Frank Pollari, lead of the C-Enternet team of scientists.
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The current system, he said, provides a limited scope of information because of the variability in reporting food poisoning across the country.
“With C-Enternet the idea is that we go into a specific area and would deal directly with … the (local) health unit to give us the best information they can get from each case of food borne disease,” he said.
Essentially what that does, he said, is “help them know where our problems are coming from.”
C-Enternet, if implemented as a national project, could put Canada on top of the world when it comes to combating E. coli and other sources of food poisoning.
“It would put us ahead as far as surveillance systems go,” Pollari said.
It would likely lead to the detection of more Canadian outbreaks initially, he said, but then numbers would drop once prevention measures were put in place.
The long-term goal of C-Enternet is to establish five sentinel sites in Canada, where officials can work with local health organizations to collect data and strengthen health policies.
Richard Holley, a University of Manitoba food science professor who has concerns about Canada’s surveillance system, backs the program.
“They have plans to make it national, but it’s only funded through 2008,” he said. “The kind of data they want to generate is the kind of data we need.”
The C-Enternet program is important, he added, because “we have no national program in place for outbreak reporting … and it’s a real need.”
