Global Foodborne Disease Surveillance System Faces Hurdles

Last February, the World Health Organization, as part of its development of a strategic plan for food safety, proposed a system to detect “global hazards” of supranational interest in the food supply, using combined epidemiologic and laboratory surveillance (see Food Technology, May 2001, p. 22).

There seem to be many impediments to such a system, including several centered on national interests. In “Impediments to Global Surveillance of Infectious Diseases: Consequences of Open Reporting in a Gl…