2009 China-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium

Engineering and Public Health: Ensuring Food Safety

October 19, 2009 09:00 – 10:30

The national and international interconnectedness of the food production, processing, and distribution system creates significant challenges in engineering robust processes and systems that ensure protection of human health.  This session will address the variety of points on this spectrum in which engineering plays a critical role in addressing these challenges. 

The first speaker, Wu Yongning from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, will address integrated risk analysis for controlling food safety. 

The second speaker, Nathan Anderson from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will address the application of risk assessment methodologies to food safety challenges, with particular focus on unique challenges of dealing with high degrees of uncertainty and critical gaps in the necessary body of knowledge. 

The third speaker, Zhang Dabing from Shinghai Jiao Tong University, will discuss GMO analysis in China. 

The fourth speaker, Ferhan Ozadali from Nestle' Nutrition in the U.S., will discuss the practical constraints involved in the adoption of novel, cutting-edge food safety technologies to ensure the protection of consumer health.

Speakers
Ning Li
Ning Li
China Agricultural University
Haidian District, China
Speeches
Capability Building of Food Safety: Where Do We Stand In China?
Yongning Wu
Yongning Wu
Chinese Center for Diseases Control and Prevention
The Food Safety Objective Approach to Risk-Based Process Design

As more consumers demand nutritious, fresh-like, ready-to-eat foods in convenient packaging, outbreaks associated with dry food ingredients including peanuts and tree nuts (almonds and pistachios), powdered infant formula and seeds for sprouts have been the headline news.  Traditional thermal approaches to decontaminating these foods can cause adverse effects to product quality; therefore, alternative processes for decontaminating dry materials are desirable.  Scientists and engineers have fueled a surge in the development of new processing technologies aimed at delivering numerous high quality shelf-stable and extended shelf-life (ESL) foods. As existing technologies are refined and novel microbial inactivation technologies are developed to meet consumer demands, there is a growing need for a metric that can be used to judge equivalent levels of hazard control stringency in order to ensure food safety.  
 
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