— OPINION — The battle against foodborne disease has been waged since the beginning of time. Historical literature provides evidence of how earlier civilizations tried to protect themselves, their families, tribes, and villages from getting sick from the food they ate. The examples range from the emergence of cooking with fire to initial attempts to preserve foods with salt and spices to the invention of the first refrigeration units.
While they weren’t the type of refrigerators you and I have at home today, prior civilizations did construct wooden boxes that kept foods cold with blocks of ice. Fast forward through time and we witnessed steady advancements that improved food safety, such as through the discovery of pasteurization by one of my heroes, Louis Pasteur, to the canning of foods, and – in more recent times – the invention of HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point), a risk management framework that was created by NASA and Pillsbury to strengthen foodborne illnesses prevention among astronauts in the U.S.
space program. The Foodborne Disease Battlefield is Changing However, the battle against foodborne disease is a never-ending race between detection and prevention. The food system continues to change, there is a growing at-risk population, and new and emerging foodborne hazards are being identified.
For example, if you look at the foodborne pathogens that we battled as a society in the first part of the 20 th century, they look quite different than t.