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<< back to the 2001 archive listing << Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation My Perspective, August 2001 My how time flies! Remember when you were a child and it seemed to take forever for school to be over for the year? And how fast the summer holidays went by and it was time for school again? Well, this past year as IAFP President has seemed to fly by like the summer holidays — it is hard to believe that the time has come for the Annual Meeting and the passing of the gavel to Jim Dickson, President of your Association for the next year. But when I think back over some of the year’s accomplishments, then I can believe it has been a full year. Of course the year started out with our highly successful meeting in Atlanta — over 1,300 attendees, with representatives from 31 countries. Not too many months later we held our first workshop in a country other than the United States and Canada. "Produce Safety in Latin America: Experiences, challenges and impact on international trade" was held November 12, 2000, in Guadalajara, Mexico, in cooperation with our Affiliate, the Mexico Association for Food Protection. We learned a lot about the challenges of hosting a workshop in another country, which has better prepared us for the next one. And there will be a next one. Right now we are looking into an "opportunity" for a similar workshop in Costa Rica and a symposium in Guatemala. This year we instituted a new award, not to make the Awards Banquet even longer,
but because we became aware that there was a gap in recognizing bench scientists,
who are a strong component of our Membership. Weber Scientific stepped up to
sponsor the Maurice Weber Laboratorian Award to be presented to an individual
for outstanding contributions in the laboratory and recognizing a commitment
to the development of innovative and practical analytical approaches in support
of food safety. We are delighted that Beth Johnson will be receiving the award
at IAFP 2001. We have also been in the process of developing criteria This year also saw the inauguration of a tiered Sustaining Membership program, with silver and gold levels of support in addition to the base level. A substantial portion of the silver and gold membership fee goes to the IAFP Foundation Fund to establish a speaker support mechanism, expanding our capability to provide travel assistance to Annual Meeting speakers. Kraft Foods became our first Gold Sustaining Member. F&H Food Equipment Company, Dupont Qualicon, Silliker Laboratories Group and Weber Scientific have led the way as Silver Sustaining Members. We are very excited about this program, as it will provide the opportunity to bring to our Meeting cutting-edge and high-profile speakers who might not otherwise be able to attend. In the May 2001 issue of Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation, IAFP published its first paper in a language other than English. This paper, originally published in English in DFES in August 1999 (Tompkin, R. B. et al., 1999. Guidelines to prevent post-processing contamination from Listeria monocytogenes, Dairy, Food Env. Sanit. 19:551–562), was re-published in Spanish. The Board felt that publishing an article on practical, applied topics occasionally in another language might help demonstrate our commitment to being an international organization. The Executive Board provided a response form to determine our Members’ thoughts on this. Approximately two-thirds of respondents felt that we should occasionally publish an article in both English and a non-English language; over 90% saw the benefit of putting the non-English version on the Association’s Web site at the time the English version was published in DFES. Full details of the survey are published on page 718 and have been reviewed by the DFES Management Committee. This year IAFP also had a professional survey of our publications conducted. We commissioned Research USA, Inc. to survey our Members to find out more about them, their work, and their readership of our publications. The response rate was fantastic — over two-thirds of those sent the survey returned them. The responses were quite favorable; it appears that our Members make good use of the journals, finding information of use to themselves and passing the publications or articles from them on to others. The survey information has been provided to the Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation and Journal of Food Protection Management Committees for their consideration. The survey summary will also be published in DFES later this year. And while we are on the topic of the journals, I am pleased to report that submissions to JFP have grown so much that we have had to take on a third editor. The search committee, under the direction of JFP Management Committee Chairperson Don Connor, also had to find a replacement editor for Larry Beuchat, who is retiring as co-editor at the end of December. After carefully considering the submissions, which included a number of highly qualified candidates, the search committee selected Joe Frank and Michael Davidson to join John Sofos as editors of the Journal of Food Protection this fall. Please join me in welcoming them to their new positions. Another highlight of this year was the election of Kathy Glass to the IAFP Board. Her term as Secretary starts at the end of this year’s meeting and progresses through various Executive Board positions to President (where she will have to write this column!) and then Past President — a five-year commitment. Please congratulate Kathy when you have the opportunity. Some of you may remember that in my first column last September I wrote about the IAFP Foundation Fund and the goal of "$100,000 in 2000." The plan was to raise the balance of the Foundation Fund from around $70,000 in 1997 to $100,000 by the year 2000. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it by the end of December 2000. However, we weren’t off by too much: in April 2001, just four months later than targeted, the IAFP Foundation Fund reached $100,000. We couldn’t have done it without the generosity of the many contributors listed in the July and August 2001 issues of DFES — well over 100 individual contributors and four of our Affiliate Associations made contributions between January 1, 2000 and the end of February 2001, not to mention the Sustaining Members, a portion of whose dues go to the Foundation. I am also delighted to report that Kraft Foods is making a $25,000 contribution to the Foundation Fund. Stay tuned for information on the Corporate Challenge that accompanies this contribution. We completed the year with our Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, which at the
time of writing this column, appears to be headed toward exceeding this year’s
attendance. Let me be the first to thank all of the presenters and convenors
who make our program successful. I hope you were able to join us in Minneapolis
to take advantage of the great technical program. |