Food safety experts from some 120 countries gathered in Morocco yesterday for an international conference that takes place in the shadow of a new food scare in Europe.
The meeting, sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Health Organisation (WHO), brings together some 300 experts from four continents in the southern city of Marrakesh.
"Many countries are reporting significant increases in food-borne diseases. This tells us that food safety systems are not keeping up with changes in microbiological and chemical hazards," WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland said in a message to the forum's opening session.
"The WHO organisation together with FAO and our member states are working hard to develop new evidence-based preventive strategies to lower the risk of disease. This work focuses on the whole food production chain," Brundtland added.
A Dutch food safety regulator said, "The participants at the Marrakesh meeting are expected to discuss their successes and mistakes in fighting food-borne disease."
The WHO said in a statement released on Monday that more two million people, mainly children, died each year from diarrhoea caused by contaminated food or water. Even in industrial countries an estimated one third of the population experienced food-borne disease each year, it added.
On Friday the European Union's Veterinary Committee recommended that the EU suspend imports of some meats and seafood from China. The recommendation followed the discovery of potent antibiotic drug residues, a potential health risk to humans, in shrimps and prawns imported from China.
Germany on Friday barred a consignment of animal feed from entering the food chain, citing lingering concern that it might contain chloramphenicol, an antibiotic used only to treat such life-threatening diseases as anthrax and typhoid because of the risk of it causing a potentially lethal form of anaemia.
The chloramphenicol was originally found in a batch of shrimps imported to the Netherlands from China, which was mixed by mistake into animal feed. The contaminated feed was in turn mixed with other ingredients in Germany into a 1,140-tonne consignment that was sold to farmers in Denmark, Poland, Romania the Czech Republic and Austria as well as Germany.
Most countries have banned chloramphenicol for use in food production, the FAO said last week, urging all nations to remove it from the food chain. The Codex Alimentarius Commission, the international body on food standards, says a maximum residue limit could not be established and so the antibiotic should not be used in food production.
Chloramphenicol caused two other, unrelated food safety alerts this month. On January 18 German authorities seized meat from an imported Dutch calf contaminated with chloramphenicol, and last Wednesday France said it had sent back to the Netherlands meat from the same consignment.
Also last week, German officials said a German calf had tested positive for the antibiotic in November 2001 and that the meat had almost certainly been consumed. Farmers have in the past given chloramphenicol to calves as animals with anaemia produce whiter veal, but German officials said they had no evidence of illegal activity in this case.