Research Publications (Food Safety)

This review article focuses on recent progress in understanding the toxins, pathogens and management of ergot, an important disease of cereals that affects food safety. Abstract Ergot is a fungal disease of many plants but is perhaps most commonly associated with domesticated grasses or cereals, such as rye, wheat, barley, oat, sorghum, millet, maize and rice.

Reducing the colonization of Salmonella in turkeys is critical to mitigating the risk of its contamination at later stages of production. Given the increased susceptibility of newly hatched poults to Salmonella colonization, it is crucial to implement interventions that target potential transmission routes, including drinking water.

Nontransgenic New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) have emerged as a promising tool for food industries, allowing food cultures to contribute to an innovative, safe, and more sustainable food system. NGTs have the potential to be applied to microorganisms, delivering on challenging performance traits like texture, flavour, and an increase of nutritional value.

Wild birds pose a difficult food safety risk to manage because they can avoid traditional wildlife mitigation strategies, such as fences. Birds often use agricultural fields and structures as foraging and nesting areas, which can lead to defecation on crops and subsequent transfer of foodborne pathogens.

Abstract The marine finfish and crustaceans contribute immensely to human nutrition. Harvesting marine food‐fish to meet the global demand has become a challenge due to reduction of the fishery areas and food safety hazards associated with increased pre‐harvest and post‐harvest contaminations. The causes of low fish availability and contaminations were reviewed following the published literature from 2000 to 2023.

A visual summary of the findings. Summary Food safety is a crucial aspect of human well‐being, covered under the second sustainable development goal (SDG). Sustainable food supply chains must ensure compliance with food safety standards from farm to fork. Consumers in developed countries are becoming ever more demanding regarding ‘producers’ compliance with food safety and quality standards.

Journal of Food Safety, EarlyView. Preharvest control strategies, to reduce or eliminate pathogenic bacteria in leafy vegetables that may be consumed raw, may provide additional food safety protection and shelf life quality extension beyond what is possible to achieve with postharvest sanitation alone.

Journal of Food Safety, EarlyView. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) fumigation has been widely used to control pathogens and maintain the postharvest quality of table grapes. However, the effective dosage of SO2 treatment is close to causing bleaching damage on fruits. Further, the SO2 potential residue is a risk to human health.

Pesticide use has grown rapidly in West Africa over the past decades. Regulatory capacity has not kept pace with the rapid proliferation of pesticide products and on-farm use. As a result, health and environmental impacts from the growing use of pesticides, despite their potential importance to food safety, remain largely unmonitored, underreported, and poorly understood by key stakeholders.

Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Ahead of Print. While growers have reported pressures to minimize wildlife intrusion into produce fields through noncrop vegetation (NCV) removal, NCV provides key ecosystem services. To model food safety and environmental tradeoffs associated with NCV removal, published and publicly available food safety and water quality data from the Northeastern United States were obtained.

Plant productivity is being seriously compromised by climate-change-induced temperature extremities. Agriculture and food safety are threatened due to global warming, and in many cases the negative impacts have already begun. Heat stress leads to significant losses in yield due to changes in growth pattern, plant phonologies, sensitivity to pests, flowering, grain filling, maturity period shrinkage, and senescence. Tomato is the second most important vegetable crop.

Introduction: Foodborne diseases, together with increasing antimicrobial resistance (AMR), pose a threat to public health in an era of huge challenges with climate change and the risks of zoonotic epidemics. A One Health approach to foster food safety is a key for improvement, particularly in complex socio-ecological systems such as in Palestine, to examine human–animal-environment interfaces and promote intersectoral action.

Water is an essential part of food animal processing, and current processing practices use large volumes of water. Due to climate change, the food industry’s access to clean and inexpensive water is increasingly a challenge. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) seeks evaluation by the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Food (NACMCF) to facilitate the safe reuse of sources of water in order to reduce water consumption.

Since the introduction of LED lamps a decade ago, the plant factory with artificial lighting (PFAL) has been expected to be a savior that overcomes the food crisis, brings food safety, and enhances environmental friendliness. Despite such high expectations, the diffusion of commercial crop production in PFALs has been slow. It has been said that the main reason for this is the huge initial investment required to construct PFALs.

Antibiotics have been overused and misused for preventive and therapeutic purposes. Specifically, antibiotics are frequently used as growth promoters for improving productivity and performance of food-producing animals such as pigs, cattle, and poultry. The increasing use of antibiotics has been of great concern worldwide due to the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Background

Journal of Food Safety, EarlyView. This study aimed to investigate the effect of soaking lettuce seeds in a lime oil emulsion at 0 (control), 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 μl/ml before growing them in a hydroponic plantation. After harvesting baby lettuce at Day 21, all lettuce was kept inside the refrigerator (4 ± 2°C) for the next 7 days. The microbiological quality and the antioxidant properties of lettuce were also investigated.

Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, EarlyView. The health benefits of whole wheat consumption can be partially attributed to wheat's phytochemicals, including phenolic acids, flavonoids, alkylresorcinols, carotenoids, phytosterols, tocopherols, and tocotrienols. It is of increasing interest to produce whole wheat products that are rich in bioactive phytochemicals.

Agricultural chemical residues in farmland and crops is one of the serious public issues that constantly threatens crop production, food security, and human health. Understanding their decay mechanism in crops for accelerating their degradative metabolism is important. In this study, a rice uncharacterized cytochrome P450 gene encoding CYP76C6 was functionally identified in rice exposed to isoproturon (IPU).

Arsenic (As) contamination in agricultural soils has become a great threat to the sustainable development of agriculture and food safety. Although a lot of approaches have been proposed for dealing with soil As contamination, they are not practical in crop production due to high cost, time-taking, or operational complexity. The rapid development of nanotechnology appears to provide a novel solution to soil As contamination.

Journal of Food Safety, EarlyView.

Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, EarlyView.

The Food Safety Modernization Act’s Produce Safety Rule sets forth minimum standards for fruit and vegetable production in the U.S. One provision states that growers must not harvest dropped produce, as damage or ground contact may contaminate produce. An unpublished survey of 2020 food safety inspections conducted by the Northeast Center to Advance Food Safety identified handling of dropped covered produce as a common misunderstanding and non-compliance issue among Northeast growers.

Foodborne Salmonellosis is commonly associated with poultry and poultry products necessitating continued development of pre- and post-harvest food safety interventions and risk management strategies. Evaluating technologies and strategies is limited by availability of cost-effective, rapid laboratory methods.

Food safety has emerged as a high-urgency matter for sustainable agricultural production. Toxic metal contamination of soil and water significantly affects agricultural productivity, which is further aggravated by extreme anthropogenic activities and modern agricultural practices, leaving food safety and human health at risk. In addition to reducing crop production, increased metals/metalloids toxicity also disturbs plants’ demand and supply equilibrium.