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<< back to the 2001 archive listing << Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation My Perspective, February 2001 Where would we be without the Internet? Have you stopped to think how dependent we have become on the Internet? In the last five years we have gone from very few food safety professionals making use of E-mail and searching online for food safety information to the Internet being absolutely essential to get business done. Nowadays having the E-mail server or Internet provider "go down" is worse than when the phone system was out of service — only a computer crash is worse. Many of us start our day checking the E-mail — what has happened overnight in food safety? Many of us subscribe to "listservers" to provide us with updates on specific topics — we can rely on someone else to search for food safety news from public sources such as news-papers and food safety-related Web sites and deliver the information, often complete with hyperlinks to the original source, directly to our E-mailboxes. Some of us head directly to the Federal Register to see what new regulations the agencies have in store for the food industry today. Others head for the food recall sites to see what foods are being pulled from store shelves and why. Some of us look for our online literature searches or the most current table of contents for journals of interest. How did we manage BI (Before Internet)? Consider that IAFP has only had a Web site since April 1998. The Web site has evolved from the basic "who we are" to a particularly useful source of information. Have you checked it out lately (www.food protection.org)? In addition to general information about the Association, we now include information about the Annual Meeting plus an online registration form. Again this year, online submissions for papers and poster abstracts were received. We have put the Membership Directory online for Members only and have included the Table of Contents and Abstracts for the Journal of Food Protection. Most of the current issues of Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation is there (abstracts of peer-reviewed articles are included, but not the full text). Our publications, such as the manual for investigating foodborne illness, can be ordered online. We’ve come a long way with the Web site, but we’re not done yet. We’re very lucky to have such an enthusiastic and capable "WebMaster" as Bev Corron. She welcomes your suggestions for improvements to the Web site. Contact her with your ideas at bcorron@foodprotection.org. Food safety professionals are all busier than ever; anything that can assist us in our jobs quickly becomes essential. And with so much information out there, it sometimes becomes difficult to know where to start. Something that I find particularly useful is a list devoted to Food Safety on the Web. The "links" section of the IAFP Web site is a good place to start. However, for this to be a truly effective site, you, the Members, have to actively participate by submitting information to the IAFP staff (preferably via E-mail to bcorron@ foodprotection.org). In particular, it would be beneficial to enhance the international component of the list, as our links page tends to focus on US-based Web sites. We may also wish to consider providing some descriptive information for some of the links. The type of information that we might consider is illustrated in the following examples. • Institute of Food Science and Technology (UK): www.ifst.org. Particularly useful to food safety professionals are IFST’s Information Statements on food-related hot topics such as BSE, Mycobacterium paratuberculosis and milk, AIDS and the foodhandler, etc. Searchable. Provides a list of useful food-related mailing lists and newsgroups. • WHO Food Safety Program: www.who.int/fsf. Provides links to WHO food safety documents, Codex Alimentarius, microbiological risk assessment and more. • Eurosurveillance Weekly: www.eurosurv.org/update. Publishes news of infectious disease incidents and surveillance data, gathering news from a network of public health centers in the EU and beyond. As an international association with the mission "to provide food safety professionals worldwide with a forum to exchange information on protecting the food supply," we owe it to ourselves to enhance our Web site to make it the best site to meet our Members’ needs for food safety information. This means adding many more links from our site to others — especially international food safety sites. Please help IAFP by providing information to enhance the site. To wrap up this month, remember Award Nominations are due February 19, 2001.
Please nominate a deserving colleague. |