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Food Protection Trends A View from Wisconsin As we turn the calendar to 2005, the IAFP staff and Board are ready to tackle another year with enthusiasm. January is a busy month for IAFP with technical abstracts for the annual meeting due January 12. The Program Committee meets in Baltimore on January 21–22 to review the abstracts for acceptance, make the final determination on submitted symposia, and try to piece together the educational sessions to avoid overlap of speakers and audience. It is a complicated task to coordinate over 500 presentations for the three- day conference and to produce a balanced program. Then, the work load shifts back to the symposia organizers to confirm invitations to speakers and to the IAFP staff to contact the technical session presenters and begin work on the program book. I have heard comments from some fellow researchers that this year’s eight-month lag between submission of abstracts and presentation is excessive. We will work to improve this issue for the 2006 meeting. However, while electronic submissions have helped their work load significantly, we are still working with the same number of office staff as when we had only half the number of presentations. As a small association with limited resources, the staff needs to be able to start on the program early in order to balance all their other work responsibilities during the year. Certainly, we are ecstatic about the steady annual increase in conference attendance, exhibits, sponsorship, and submitted technical abstracts and symposia. On the other hand, our meeting is quickly reaching a size that we may be victims of our own success. While the vast majority of the returned surveys from the 2004 Phoenix meeting were very favorable, I paid particular attention to comments from members who felt over-whelmed by having too many concurrent sessions or too many technical presentations. To give you a “behind the scenes” view, we recently added more sessions to our schedule, such as the early Tuesday afternoon short sessions, to accommodate requests from members who need educational sessions on diverse topics. The IAFP meeting is the only meeting that many attend during the year; therefore, these members need a comprehensive meeting to address all their needs. But, we don’t want to resolve one issue at the expense of spreading ourselves too thin. One of the items that will be added to the agenda for this year’s Program Committee meeting is to make a rigorous evaluation of our current design for developing the educational program. I also invite your suggestions for unique alternatives that are feasible to implement. Keep in mind that our primary objective is to provide both science and practical solutions to an inter-national audience composed of industry, regulators, and academic food protection professions. Many of these attendees have responsibilities related to both microbiological and toxicological food safety issues, and as well as issues related to multiple commodities. We want to build on our current success and maintain our status as the premier food safety association. Our association also continues its work on the IAFP Strategic Plan for 2010 and needs your assistance in fulfilling our objectives related to publications. As you may recall from my October column, our goals for enhancing our publications included increasing accessibility to publications by adding back volumes of JFP online and archiving FPT articles online after one year, developing applied food safety booklets, and developing “white papers” on important food safety issues. The addition of articles online will go forward as budget permits. But, we are still looking for ideas for topics for booklets and the white papers, and are always in need of practical food protection manuscripts for publication in FPT. During the past year, the Outreach Education Professional Development Group (PDG) came forward to revise two booklets, Food Safety at Temporary Events and Before Disaster Strikes…A Guide to Food Safety in the Home, including a Spanish language version. Both of these booklets are available for purchase through the IAFP Web site. If you have responsibilities for the food safety education of consumers, you will find these booklets very useful. This summer the Executive Board endorsed proposals by two of our committees to develop new booklets. The 3-A Committee on Sanitary Procedures will develop a booklet on sanitary equipment design, and the Committee on the Control of Foodborne Illness will revise a 6th edition of the manual outlining Procedures to Investigate Foodborne Illness. We know that there is a strong need for applied food safety publications. Please send me an E-mail with your ideas for topics or if you are willing to help in the development of a booklet. In light of our overly successful call for symposia for the annual meeting, the development of booklets and other resources for food safety professionals may be an excellent alternate activity for PDGs. We are also soliciting ideas for white papers. So far, we have received proposals for authoritative papers on redefining pasteurization, and the controversy regarding Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis and Crohn’s Disease. Once again, if you have suggestions, send me an E-mail so that we can add it to our list for consideration and appoint an appropriate task force to develop the paper. Lastly, we continue our call for FPT manuscripts on practical, applied food protection research that can be readily put into practice by field inspectors, retail managers, product developers, or quality assurance departments. I would like to repeat my appeal to researchers, professors and students to consider submitting manuscripts that provide viable solutions to our food safety problems. In addition, we are encouraging submissions in the area of applied food toxicology as it pertains to current food safety questions, as well as microbial food safety and quality research. As always, I welcome your comments. Please E-mail me at kglass@wisc.edu with your ideas for enhancing our annual meeting, booklet topics, and white papers. I look forward to hearing your view. |