FDA Risk assessment offers bleak picture on bioterrorism

Food & Drink Weekly, Oct 20, 2003

A review of past incidents of both accidental and deliberate food contamination leads FDA to the bleak conclusion that "there is a high likelihood, over the course of a year, that a significant number of people will be affected by an act of food terrorism or by an incident of unintentional food contamination that results in serious foodborne illness."

Following the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, FDA conducted earlier investigations of the risk to, and vulnerability of, the U.S. food supply to an act of terrorism. However, most of those assessments contain classified information.

The newest risk assessment, which FDA recently published in the Federal Register, is based on unclassified information on both deliberate and accidental contamination of that portion of the food supply regulated by FDA.

In a summary of its latest report, FDA says it is making the document available to inform the public of the risk to public health of acts of food terrorism, as well as incidents of unintentional contamination of food that result in significant foodborne illness. "The development of this risk assessment is one of a number of steps the agency is taking to improve its ability to prevent, prepare for, and respond to an incident of food sabotage," says FDA. The nature of bioterrorism and the fact that it is a relatively new and evolving threat "present challenges in quantitatively evaluating the associated risks," says the report.

The worldwide extent of food and water contamination is significant. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that microbiologically contaminated food and water cause approximately 2 million children worldwide to die from diarrhea each year. Even in industrialized countries, WHO estimates that one person in three suffers from a foodborne disease annually. Major outbreaks of foodborne illness around the world sometimes affect hundreds of thousands of people. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths occur annually due to food that has been inadvertently contaminated by pathogens.

If an unintentional contamination of one food can affect 300,000 individuals--as happened in China in the 1990s--"a concerted, deliberate attack on food could be devastating, especially if a more dangerous chemical, biological, or radionuclear agent were used," says FDA. "It would be reasonable to assume that a terrorist using the food supply as a vehicle for attack would use an agent that would maximize the number of deaths associated with the contamination," says the report. More troubling is the fact that many of these potential contaminants are the same pathogens that have been linked to significant outbreaks of foodborne illness due to unintentional contamination. FDA does not detail how it, CDC or any other government agency is preparing for the "high likelihood" of food terrorism.