'What a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of any hypothesis'.
Mary Wollstonecraft
I came across this quotation in my Christmas reading and it seems as apt now as it was in the 1790s. It got me thinking about how we don’t let truth get in the way of a juicy food safety story.
One of the most puzzling and worrying things I noticed last year was the reaction to two separate food safety incidents in Germany. The first –animal feed contaminated with dioxins– caused farms to shut and sales of pork to plummet, although fortunately no one’s health was harmed. Campaigners and pressure groups were, quite reasonably, outraged that food had been contaminated in this way, and the fall-out filled the papers in Germany for weeks.
Later, an outbreak of E.coli linked to sprouted seeds that killed 50 people, injured 4,000 and caused 2,000 cases of kidney disease, got very little attention from the pressure groups and much less concern from the public than the earlier dioxin incident.
Now this is really very odd. One incident harmed no one (at least in terms of their health – the economic impact is a different matter) whereas the other was one of the worst ever outbreaks of food poisoning.
And there’s one problem that makes 9 million people sick each year in the EU but gets very little attention. Any guesses? I’ll give you a clue: it’s not GM, dioxins or Bisphenol A. In fact, it’s campylobacter.
The serious point here is how a distorted perception of risk can influence policy. Our duty, particularly at a time of economic restraint, is to ensure that efforts on food safety are informed by science and focused on those issues with the biggest public health impact – not who shouts loudest.
Come on campaigners. Campylobacter infection is a serious issue, so start shouting about this, the biggest cause of food-related illness, so that we can make the biggest difference. I imagine if GM foods were making millions of people ill every year, you’d be shouting a little louder!
Let’s keep on pushing the facts and the truth in 2012.
Happy New Year!