Consumer: Summary for consumers and outline of consumer work

Introduction

Illness resulting from foodborne disease has become one of the most widespread public health problems in the contemporary world.

It is estimated that 3.5 million UK consumers are annually affected by episodes of foodborne disease with many cases sporadic and linked to the domestic kitchen.

Effective consumer food safety communication strategies are required to reduce the prevalence of risk related food-handling behaviours, increase consumer awareness of risks, and motivate consumers to change unsafe behaviour.

When setting its targets, the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) considered that a significant reduction in the number of cases of foodborne disease was likely to result from focused attention on food preparation practices and raising the standards of food hygiene in the home.  

But there is another way to address this issue; and that is to actually reduce the incidence of pathogenic (harmful) bacteria in food.

This is what PathogenCombat is trying to do.

PathogenCombat is developing new scientific approaches and techniques to investigate the survival of pathogens:

• in animal feed and in human food;
• on surfaces in the food chain (e.g. surfaces in and on food processing equipment); and
• in the intestinal tract of farm animals.

In addition to improving our understanding of how pathogens survive in these environments, we are also seeking new and improved ways of eliminating them.

The scientific techniques, some of which is being used for the first time in food safety studies, include:

• bioimaging;
• laser tweezers;
• phage display/convergent evolution;
• functional mammalian cell models; and
• functional genomics and microarrays.

Complementing the scientific work are the NTC (Network, Training and Consumers) Pillars of PathogenCombat:

• a network of SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) has been created;
• these businesses will be trained in the new techniques we are developing;
• skills in these techniques will be transferred to even more SMEs through our PathogenCombat workshops which take place at regular intervals throughout Europe.

PathogenCombat's consumer related work

The consumer-related work in PathogenCombat is concerned with understanding more about how to effectively communicate food safety-related information to European citizens.  We have noted above that:

Effective consumer food safety communication strategies are required to reduce the prevalence of risk related food-handling behaviours, increase consumer awareness of risks, and motivate consumers to change unsafe behaviour.

Accordingly, PathogenCombat is developing new ways of understanding how consumers hear, read and learn about food safety information. 

We recognise that people are not all the same and that different types of people would like to be able to access information in a variety of different ways.

There are also different communication channels (magazines, newspapers, radio, television) for food safety information and also different sources (government, national food standards agencies, scientists, schools).

There are also different types of message.

Our research will examine the best ways of matching up different types of people with the most appropriate types of message, through the best communication channels and from the most trusted sources.

>>read more about PathogenCombat and the public