Iowa State is teaming up with universities across the country to study and develop multi-disciplinary ways to deal with food safety issues.

The Food Safety Research Consortium, announced Feb. 6 in Washington D.C., will include universities from across the United States.

“[This] group of top universities in the U.S. are dealing with issues of food safety,” said J. Glenn Morris, professor and chairman of the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “[This will] combine a traditional food safety expertise with a strong public health [and] epidemiology background and a strong economic background.”

The consortium was developed because of an agreement between the public health community, food processing industry and various government agencies that the United States needs to develop a more risk-based, science-based system of making food safety decisions, said Catherine Woteki, dean of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State.

Agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, Food Safety and Inspection and Environmental Protection Agency are only involved in day to day decisions on food safety, Woteki said.

“They have a very full agenda and aren’t really able to take a step back and look broadly at how one would develop a risk-based, science-based food safety system,” she said. “This group of universities decided that’s a gap that needs to be filled and that’s something we can do.” The Food Safety Research Consortium will look at two concerns with food safety, Morris said. “There are ongoing issues in terms of the simple problem that we do have people that get sick from eating food,” he said. “[The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data suggests there have been a general decline in cases of food-borne illness, but there are still a lot of problems that need to be dealt with in trying to make food as safe as possible for people in the U.S.”

The second concern is a continuing issue with how government resources available for food safety should be allocated, Morris said.

Woteki said the Food Safety Research Consortium has defined both long-term and short-term goals, including developing risk-assessment models that will initially help decision makers in government and private sectors in ranking risks that are associated with food and food safety.

“We are beginning to develop a model that calculates risk either associated with pathogens or the food that is associated with outbreaks and quantifies health effects in respect to a number of illnesses and number of deaths on an annual basis,” Woteki said.

These models are based on public health and epidemiology and applies an element of economic analysis as well as providing the people making decisions as to where the real problem is, Morris said.