The Microbiology Society supports a new cross-government project to track foodborne pathogens
£19.2 million funding will support a three-year project to develop a pilot national surveillance network, using the latest DNA-sequencing technology and environmental sampling to improve the detection and tracking of foodborne and antimicrobial resistant pathogens through the whole agri-food system from farm to fork. The heart of this ‘virtual’ network will be a new database that will permit the analysis, storage and sharing of pathogen sequence and source data, collected from multiple locations across the UK by both government and public organisations.
The Microbiology Society will be hosting a series of online meetings between Monday 4 October and Thursday 7 October 2021, bringing together stakeholders from the foodborne pathogens and AMR in the environment and food-chain sectors, to brainstorm and get the science underway. The meetings will reflect a ‘One Health’ approach, recognising that health, food and environment are all linked and that AMR in the environment can have profound implications for other sectors. There will also be an opportunity to find out more about the project from the different stakeholders involved.
Prof. Rick Mumford, Deputy Director of Science & Head of Science for the FSA said:
“In the PATH-SAFE project, we are tackling the dual challenges of AMR and foodborne disease. Annually, in the UK, foodborne pathogens are estimated to cause 2.4 million cases of foodborne illness and have a societal burden of over £9bn. In this new cross-government project, we will build tools and generate new data to help better track and understand the spread of pathogens and resistant microbes, across the agri-food-environment system and taking a One Health approach.”
Details of the surveillance project meetings will be announced shortly. If you have any questions or would like to request more information please contact [email protected]. In the meantime, please register your interest in attending via our online form.
Further information will also be shared across our social media channels, and you can follow us on Twitter @MicrobioSoc.
Image: iStock/metamorworks
