Perspectives from North of the 49th
December 2005

“Our meeting in Prague, the first ever IAFP meeting outside of North America was a smashing success!”
By Jeffrey Farber, IAFP President        

I have just returned from Prague and wanted to let you in on the news right away! Our meeting in Prague, the first ever IAFP meeting outside of North America was a smashing success! It truly was a historic moment for IAFP. Our first early indicator of this was when people came up to us and asked us where the meeting will be next year, and that they are really looking forward to seeing these meetings on a regular basis! This was music to our ears. The Executive Board had been thinking about putting on a meeting outside of North America for some time and to see it come to fruition and end on a successful note was just fantastic. The meeting was held at the Dorint Novotel Hotel and Conference Centre which was outside the old town of Prague, an excellent location. The meeting room was very spacious and we had very good help and cooperation from the AV people at the hotel. The only glitch we had was actually with the mail system! We had sent out boxes of IAFP folders and material two weeks before the meeting and they arrived a day after the meeting! Such is life! We were still able to distribute the IAFP promotional material to the many people who stayed after our meeting to attend an ILSI-Europe workshop.

A meeting such as this does not go off so smoothly without a lot of dedicated hard work and effort. I just wanted to take this opportunity to personally thank everyone involved! The whole event was truly a team effort! Lisa helped keep things organized along with David (printed materials, etc.). Julie and Farrah processed registrations. Bev helped with posting information on the Web site. Tamara, our newest employee, worked on posting the presentations and pictures on our Web site. Everyone at the IAFP office helped with a couple of mailing projects! We even put Connie Tharp and Barbara Farber to work the morning of the meeting! Nancy did an outstanding job both before and at
the meeting, keeping everything running smoothly! A big thank you to our bronze sponsors and exhibitors, BD Diagnostics and DuPont Qualicon, our sponsor and exhibitor bioMérieux as well our additional exhibitors, the British Food Journal, International Food Hygiene, Matrix Microsciences and ILSI-Europe. We also had a very good presence from our IAFP Past Presidents as Jenny Scott (presenter), Anna Lammerding (chair-person) and Paul Hall (participant), were present and involved with the meeting.

I also wanted to acknowledge the whole organizing committee: Laurentina Pedroso, Leon Gorris, Lone Gram, Gordon Hayburn, Anna Lammerding, David Tharp, Bruce Tompkin, and Sandra Tuijtelaars. In addition, David Lloyd very kindly took over as Co-chair from Gordon Hayburn and did a great job. I also would like to personally thank Leon Gorris, who really helped us tremendously with all the scientific aspects of the meeting. As briefly mentioned above, the abstracts, as well as the slides from each of the talks are available on the IAFP Web site, so that our Members, as well as the scientific community, can benefit from the outstanding presentations that were given by all the speakers. So please visit our Web site and take advantage of this!

To continue on with the excitement, right after our meeting, IAFP was also involved as a co-sponsor of a risk assessment workshop that was put on by ILSI- Europe. The whole ILSI-Europe team (Sandra Tuijtelaars, Toula Aslanidis, Nico van Belzen, and Ruth Marquet) was fantastic to work with. As many of you know, we have had a great association with ILSI North America for a number of years. Our new connections to ILSI-Europe could really open a number of new avenues to us, as we continue our strategic goal of truly becoming an international association. A number of IAFP Members also participated in the ILSI-Europe risk assessment workshop. The workshop began on Wednesday afternoon and went until Friday afternoon. At the beginning of the workshop, David Tharp gave a talk to all participants about the goals of our Association (I did a similar thing at the start of our IAFP symposium), and IAFP was acknowledged throughout the meeting. Both of these meetings gave IAFP excellent visibility in the international food safety community, and I think you will see us reaping tremendous benefits from our active participation and involvement in these two meetings. Some of you may know that we also co-sponsored the ICMSF two-day meeting which was held in Washington, D.C. the first of November. More about this at a later date!

As always, I can be reached by E-mail at: jeff_farber@hc-sc.gc.ca and would love to hear from you!

Quote of the month :

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

For you literary buffs, Franz Kafka, born in 1883, was a novelist and also a lawyer, who was born and lived in Prague, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He published only a few short stories during his lifetime, and so his writing did not attract much attention until after he died in 1924. Before dying, he had told his friend and literary executor Max Brod, to destroy all of his manuscripts. His girlfriend, Dora Dymant, faithfully destroyed all the manuscripts that she had. However, Max did not follow Kafka’s instructions, and actually oversaw the publication of most of his work, which soon began to attract attention and critical regard.

Have a great month!