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A View from Wisconsin Welcome to IAFP 2005! In just two short months, that will be our greeting to all the attendees at our Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. We invite you to participate in what we expect will be the largest meeting in our Association’s history. We anticipate over 1,600 attendees for the 2005 conference, compared with half that number just a decade ago. But, even though our Annual Meeting continues to grow each year, our numbers are still small enough to make this an “intimate” conference compared with the much larger meetings of our sister associations, such as the American Society for Microbiology and Institute for Food Technologists. Please review the program which is highlighted in this issue or visit our Web site for details and registration information. If you haven’t made your hotel reservation yet, I encourage you to do so soon because rooms are limited at the conference hotel, the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. Don’t miss out on being part of the premier food safety meeting. On a more personal basis, my co-workers and I are looking forward to this year’s meeting for many reasons, including the keynote lectures, the symposia and technical sessions, visiting with the exhibitors, meeting friends, and making new contacts with colleagues from around the world. This year’s program features “Bookend Lectures” opening the meeting on Sunday evening with Dr. Douglas Archer, who will present the Ivan Parkin Lecture, and concluding the Wednesday afternoon program with Dr. Michiel van Schothorst providing the John H. Silliker Lecture. In between, our educational programming includes tracks for dairy, meat, produce, retail, water, toxicology, epidemiology and public health, and food safety for the future (e.g., novel detection methodology, risk analysis, predictive models; emerging pathogens). As David Tharp pointed out in his March commentary, we are experimenting with rearranging our agenda so that we can expand our exhibit hall hours to give you more opportunities to meet with supply and service providers and to maximize attendance at all our symposia, technical oral sessions, and poster presentations. We look forward to your comments about the success of these changes. In addition to the scientific programming, I invite you to join in one of the many opportunities to meet with your colleagues during any of the open meetings for the Professional Development Groups (PDGs) and other committees on Sunday. The week has options for various social activities as well. Get in early and take advantage of the Saturday Welcome to Washington Tour to experience the sights of the United States capital. Golfers and baseball fans have the chance to begin the IAFP 2005 festivities with a round of golf and/or attend the Baltimore Orioles vs. Toronto Blue Jays game on Saturday. Other evening social events include a cruise on the Baltimore Harbor on Monday or a walking tour and dinner in Little Italy on Tuesday night. As always, our meeting will close with the Awards Banquet when we will honor our colleagues for their dedication to IAFP and to our mission to promote food safety. Although IAFP membership is only 3,000 strong, it is represented by a multitude of professional sectors: academia, producers, processed food manufacturers, retail, food service, local and national regulatory officials and public health professionals. As you can see from carefully reviewing our Annual Meeting program, we try to ensure that each group is represented and that the range in food protection topics presented mirrors the diversity among our attendees. Furthermore, we are sensitive to the issue that many of our attendees “wear more than one hat” and that IAFP may be their primary, and perhaps only, source for up-to-date information. Therefore, we need to provide the latest facts and discussion on a wide variety of topics such as regulatory changes, laboratory methods, water quality and safety, toxicology, and epidemiology, as well as sanitation and other microbiological issues. Also, we recently recognized the need to improve the level of “applied” programming at the Annual Meeting to provide critical food safety information to quality assurance, plant personnel, and inspectors. We anticipate this year’s conference to reflect this evolution in programming by providing practical solutions to food safety concerns. It is indeed a challenge to serve all our constituents without growing too large, but we have strong commitment to be efficient in our time and resources. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank all the symposia organizers, speakers, and technical presenters for volunteering their ideas and their time. Your contributions provide the backbone for our meeting. The Program Committee has the unenviable job of choosing the best of-the-best submissions and in ensuring our program is balanced. It may be hard to believe, but our members will start planning the 2006 meeting in Calgary before we even open the 2005 meeting. If you are interested in submitting a symposia or workshop for consideration, please review the guidelines available in this issue or online. For your convenience, we have also provided an electronic copy of the submission form in the Annual Meeting section of our Web site. We encourage PDGs and other volunteers to begin their discussions before the August meeting in order to identify and fine-tune potential topics and suggested speakers. I hope to see you in Baltimore in August. Please encourage your co-workers, your students, and other food safety professionals you know who may not be familiar yet with IAFP, to join our organization and to attend our Annual Meeting. It will be a meeting they wouldn’t want to miss. As always, I welcome your ideas and comments. Please feel free to email me at kglass@wisc.edu and let me know your view.
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