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<< back to the 2002 archive listing << Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation Commentary From The Executive Director We are excited to announce the Board's approval to place the Journal of
Food Protection online This month, I want to review the January Executive Board meeting and the Program Committee meeting with you. A few very important decisions were made at both meetings that may affect you as an IAFP Member. Please read on. The highlights of the Executive Board meeting are shown on page 196 of this issue of DFES. In this column, I will concentrate on only a few of the points covered there. At the Board meeting, it was announced that Jim Dickson, IAFP President would serve a three-year term on the International HACCP Alliance Board of Directors. The Board discussed and accepted a proposal to begin a “Water Safety and Quality Professional Development Group (PDG). This PDG will hold its first meeting on Sunday, June 30 at IAFP 2002 in San Diego. See page 225 if you are interested in more information about the new PDG. We are excited to announce the Board’s approval to place the Journal of Food Protection online. As was mentioned in the January issue, we have been working to find financially creative ways to place JFP online, and have now found a way that IAFP can afford. We project that the online version of JFP will be available sometime in April. Watch your April issue of DFES for more information on how to access JFP online. Speaking of the Journal of Food Protection, we came up one submission short of receiving 500 manuscripts for publication in the year 2001. That is a new record for submissions. You may have noted the size of recent issues, October through February. They were quite large! For the 2001 volume, we published 2,148 pages in comparison to 1,800 in the 2000 volume. Almost a 20% increase in pages published! We should also point out that this was accomplished without an increase in fees to our Members. The Executive Board discussed and agreed in principal to the formation of a new entity, 3-A Sanitary Standards, Inc. This entity will come together to manage and operate the entire 3-A Sanitary Standards process including development of, maintenance of and publishing of uniform standards and practices for the sanitary design, fabrication, installation and operation of food and dairy processing equipment and machinery. In addition to IAFP, there will be four founding member organizations including the 3-A Sanitary Standards Symbol Administrative Council, the American Dairy Products Institute (ADPI), the International Association of Food Industry Suppliers (IAFIS), and the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA). At the Program Committee meeting, the Committee approved 23 symposia, two lectures, six technical sessions and five poster sessions for the largest, most complete Annual Meeting program in the history of the Association! This year we experienced a 33% increase in technical abstracts submitted in comparison to last year. This is unprecedented growth, which demonstrates the extreme interest in our Annual Meeting and our Member’s work. The Preliminary Program is outlined on page 215. Make your plans now to be in San Diego for IAFP 2002 — you surely won’t want to miss this year’s meeting! On Friday and Saturday preceding IAFP 2002, we will offer four workshops. The workshop titles are shown on page 224. Additional information is available at the IAFP Web site and will also be available in April’s issue of DFES. I want to wrap up this month with announcing our Opening Session, Ivan Parkin Lecturer for IAFP 2002. Dr. Mitchell L. Cohen from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will deliver his presentation “Food Safety in the Time of Anthrax.” We look forward to hearing Dr. Cohen’s presentation and we hope that you will be in attendance at IAFP 2002, the leading food safety conference! |