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Food Safety Management
Paradigm Shift in Food Safety Approaches with ‘One Health’
Paradigm Shift in Food Safety Approaches with ‘One Health’
Arundhathy Shabu
April 26, 2024
Food Safety Management
Paradigm Shift in Food Safety Approaches with ‘One Health’
Arundhathy Shabu
April 26 , 2024
Paradigm Shift in Food Safety Approaches with ‘One Health’
Food Safety Management
Arundhathy Shabu
.
April 26, 2024
Thomas Kuhn’s theory states that the development of science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. This theory provides insight into the necessity of paradigm shifts when existing models fail to address emerging challenges effectively. As food safety is a concept deeply rooted in established science-based principles and practices, Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions elucidates that there is a need for ongoing improvement of food safety knowledge and perceptions.
The global food system stands as a monumental achievement in agriculture and business. However, it also brings about unprecedented challenges that pose substantial risks to human health, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability. Sustaining a secure food supply demands increased cooperation, deeper understanding, and innovative methodologies.
This is where adopting a ‘One Health‘ model offers a holistic approach to food safety, emphasizing prevention and collaboration across disciplines. Exploring the potential of ‘One Health’ emerges as a compelling and timely strategy for addressing issues related to global food safety.
Food Safety Management Software
Boost your food business’s hygiene standards with Smart Food Safe’s tech-driven solutions—streamline 4C processes to yield optimal results, and ensure compliance effortlessly.
Food Safety Management Software
Boost your food business’s hygiene standards with Smart Food Safe’s tech-driven solutions—streamline 4C processes to yield optimal results, and ensure compliance effortlessly.
Understanding ‘One Health’
One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach — working at the local, regional, national, and global levels — with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes by recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.
While One Health is not a new concept, its significance has grown in recent times due to various changes such as
- With the expanding human population, people are moving into new areas, bringing them into closer proximity with both wild and domestic animals, including livestock and pets. Animals are integral to our lives, serving purposes such as food, clothing, livelihoods, transportation, recreation, education, and companionship. This increased interaction with animals and their habitats creates more opportunities for diseases to transfer between animals and humans.
- Moreover, the Earth is undergoing significant changes in climate and land use, including deforestation and intensified agricultural practices. These environmental disruptions can create new avenues for diseases to spread among animals.
- The movement of people, animals, and animal products has surged due to international travel and trade. This global mobility means that diseases can now spread rapidly across borders and continents.
One Health concerns encompass newly emerging, recurring, and persistent zoonotic diseases, neglected tropical illnesses, diseases transmitted by vectors, antimicrobial resistance, food safety and security, environmental pollution, climate change, and other health risks that affect both humans and animals, as well as the broader environment.
Working
One Health is built upon the following concepts:
- Communication
- Coordination
- Collaboration
One Health is increasingly acknowledged both in the United States and worldwide as a potent strategy for addressing health challenges at the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health, particularly zoonotic diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employs a One Health approach, engaging a spectrum of experts from various disciplines and sectors to monitor, control, and gain insights into the spread of diseases among humans, animals, plants, and the environment.
Effective public health interventions necessitate the active participation and collaboration of professionals across human health (such as doctors, nurses, and epidemiologists), animal health (including veterinarians, and agricultural workers), environmental science (like ecologists, and wildlife experts), and beyond. The involvement of other key stakeholders like law enforcement, policymakers, agricultural sectors, communities, and pet owners is crucial. This is critical as no single entity can tackle the multifaceted challenges at the human-animal-environment interface in isolation.
Benefits
The One Health approach offers several benefits:
- Disease Prevention: Mitigating the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks in both animals and humans.
- Overhauled Food Safety: Improving food safety protocols and ensuring food security.
- Combatting Antimicrobial Resistance: Reducing the prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant infections to bolster human and animal health.
- Global Health Security: Strengthening global health infrastructure and preparedness.
- Conservation and Biodiversity: Safeguarding biodiversity and promoting conservation efforts.
One Health, Food Systems, and Resilience—The FOR Platform
The FOR approach integrates sustainable food production, environmental health, and community resilience to create a holistic system that supports both human and planetary well-being, with the following key points:
- Interdisciplinary and Intersectoral Collaborations: Foster real-time data sharing and coordination among various sectors and disciplines within the FOR framework.
- Systems Thinking: Recognize and address complex interactions over time, considering larger systems when tackling health issues.
- Preventive Approaches: Prioritize environmental protection, vaccinations, hygiene promotion, and infection control to manage challenges related to food and water safety, agri/food supply, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
- Social-Ecological Lens: Direct research towards governance, policies, culture, societal values, equity, and community engagement, understanding that global health security and sustainability hinge on addressing societal weaknesses.
- Surveillance and Transparency: Continuously monitor and evaluate health risks and intervention effectiveness to identify and address potential health threats.
- Sustainability: Emphasize long-term sustainability of human, animal, and environmental health by adopting sustainable practices.
- Biosecurity and Health Security: Implement evidence-based and innovative tools, including rapid detection, remote sensing, AI, preventive measures, and biosecurity protocols.
- Ethical Considerations: Integrate ethical considerations into research and activities, prioritizing “first do no harm” and recognizing interdependencies and trade-offs.
Despite our interlinked reality, our scientific and health systems often operate in silos, complicating efforts to address complex food safety issues. Traditional approaches that prioritize human health over animal and environmental health overlook the all-encompassing nature of disease transmission and control. The complexity of today’s food systems, coupled with the challenges posed by zoonotic diseases and food-borne illnesses, demands a revamped food safety ideology.
Embracing One Health for Enhanced Global Food Safety
While significant progress has been made in food safety, especially in countries like the United States, transformative thinking remains scarce. Consumer demand and retailer initiatives are driving much of the change, underscoring the need for novel frameworks like One Health. The adoption of One Health brings forth the following food safety aspects to the limelight:
Transition to Transdisciplinary Food Safety
The conventional compartmentalization of health domains no longer serves us in addressing these diverse challenges. We must transition from isolated approaches to a transdisciplinary understanding of food safety grounded in the principles of One Health.
Collaborative Learning & Development
The concept of “wicked problems” encapsulates many of the contemporary challenges we face—problems that are interrelated and societal in nature. The emergence of a One Health community of practice offers a platform for synergistic learning and the development of new and state-of-the-art approaches to food safety.
Adapting & Evolving Food Safety Practices
The convergence of human, animal, and environmental health has ushered in a new era of food supply that is becoming susceptible to both intentional and unintentional contamination, necessitating a shift in focus toward the origins of pathogens across different domains. The implementation of One Health offers promising solutions but also poses disruptions to established systems and entrenched beliefs, requiring us to adapt and evolve.
Resolve Ecological and Evolutionary Instabilities
Applying the principles of One Health to our complex food system offers a foundation for understanding ecological and evolutionary instabilities due to the cohabitation of humans, animals, plants, and microbes on our planet, and devising appropriate strategies for the same. The implementation of One Health offers promising solutions but also poses disruptions to established systems and entrenched beliefs, requiring us to adapt and evolve.
Dr. Josh Lederberg, a Nobel Laureate once remarked about the future of humanity’s relationship with microbial infections to be determined by “our wits versus their genes,” which remains the central theme to One Health agenda, underscoring the importance of its application in shaping food safety in the years to come.
Smart Food Safe as an Advocate of One Health
Smart Food Safe is keen to play our part in advancing the goals of One Health by ensuring food safety through digital and tech-enabled solutions in tackling the complexities associated with the globalized food production system described.
Our software can significantly aid in moving to cross-sectoral food safety by working together with various disciplines and data sources on a cloud-based platform, facilitating collaborative learning and development among stakeholders. The software enables the adaptation and evolution of food safety practices by providing real-time monitoring, analytics, and reporting features based on observed insights. It further helps in pinpointing and resolving ecological and evolutionary instabilities in food manufacturing and supply chains by streamlining related processes in such a way as not to be responsible for causing any disruptions in the established ecosystem while ensuring compliance with food safety regulations.
As the distance between “farm” and “fork” continues to expand across diverse local and global sources, Smart Food Safe provides a unified tool to track and manage food production and distribution across these tedious networks.
Supply Chain Management Software
Smart Food Safe champions food enterprises to tackle the globalized food production system’s complexities with our digital tools for the food supply chain.
Thomas Kuhn’s theory states that the development of science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. This theory provides insight into the necessity of paradigm shifts when existing models fail to address emerging challenges effectively. As food safety is a concept deeply rooted in established science-based principles and practices, Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions elucidates that there is a need for ongoing improvement of food safety knowledge and perceptions.
The global food system stands as a monumental achievement in agriculture and business. However, it also brings about unprecedented challenges that pose substantial risks to human health, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability. Sustaining a secure food supply demands increased cooperation, deeper understanding, and innovative methodologies.
This is where adopting a ‘One Health‘ model offers a holistic approach to food safety, emphasizing prevention and collaboration across disciplines. Exploring the potential of ‘One Health’ emerges as a compelling and timely strategy for addressing issues related to global food safety.
Understanding ‘One Health’
One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach — working at the local, regional, national, and global levels — with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes by recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.
Food Safety Management Software
Boost your food business’s hygiene standards with Smart Food Safe’s tech-driven solutions—streamline 4C processes to yield optimal results, and ensure compliance effortlessly.
Reference:
While One Health is not a new concept, its significance has grown in recent times due to various changes such as
- With the expanding human population, people are moving into new areas, bringing them into closer proximity with both wild and domestic animals, including livestock and pets. Animals are integral to our lives, serving purposes such as food, clothing, livelihoods, transportation, recreation, education, and companionship. This increased interaction with animals and their habitats creates more opportunities for diseases to transfer between animals and humans.
- Moreover, the Earth is undergoing significant changes in climate and land use, including deforestation and intensified agricultural practices. These environmental disruptions can create new avenues for diseases to spread among animals.
- The movement of people, animals, and animal products has surged due to international travel and trade. This global mobility means that diseases can now spread rapidly across borders and continents.
One Health concerns encompass newly emerging, recurring, and persistent zoonotic diseases, neglected tropical illnesses, diseases transmitted by vectors, antimicrobial resistance, food safety and security, environmental pollution, climate change, and other health risks that affect both humans and animals, as well as the broader environment.
Working
One Health is built upon the following concepts:
- Communication
- Coordination
- Collaboration
One Health is increasingly acknowledged both in the United States and worldwide as a potent strategy for addressing health challenges at the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health, particularly zoonotic diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employs a One Health approach, engaging a spectrum of experts from various disciplines and sectors to monitor, control, and gain insights into the spread of diseases among humans, animals, plants, and the environment.
Effective public health interventions necessitate the active participation and collaboration of professionals across human health (such as doctors, nurses, and epidemiologists), animal health (including veterinarians, and agricultural workers), environmental science (like ecologists, and wildlife experts), and beyond. The involvement of other key stakeholders like law enforcement, policymakers, agricultural sectors, communities, and pet owners is crucial. This is critical as no single entity can tackle the multifaceted challenges at the human-animal-environment interface in isolation.
Benefits
The One Health approach offers several benefits:
- Disease Prevention: Mitigating the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks in both animals and humans.
- Overhauled Food Safety: Improving food safety protocols and ensuring food security.
- Combatting Antimicrobial Resistance: Reducing the prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant infections to bolster human and animal health.
- Global Health Security: Strengthening global health infrastructure and preparedness.
- Conservation and Biodiversity: Safeguarding biodiversity and promoting conservation efforts.
One Health, Food Systems, and Resilience—The FOR Platform
The FOR approach integrates sustainable food production, environmental health, and community resilience to create a holistic system that supports both human and planetary well-being, with the following key points:
- Interdisciplinary and Intersectoral Collaborations: Foster real-time data sharing and coordination among various sectors and disciplines within the FOR framework.
- Systems Thinking: Recognize and address complex interactions over time, considering larger systems when tackling health issues.
- Preventive Approaches: Prioritize environmental protection, vaccinations, hygiene promotion, and infection control to manage challenges related to food and water safety, agri/food supply, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
- Social-Ecological Lens: Direct research towards governance, policies, culture, societal values, equity, and community engagement, understanding that global health security and sustainability hinge on addressing societal weaknesses.
- Surveillance and Transparency: Continuously monitor and evaluate health risks and intervention effectiveness to identify and address potential health threats.
- Sustainability: Emphasize long-term sustainability of human, animal, and environmental health by adopting sustainable practices.
- Biosecurity and Health Security: Implement evidence-based and innovative tools, including rapid detection, remote sensing, AI, preventive measures, and biosecurity protocols.
- Ethical Considerations: Integrate ethical considerations into research and activities, prioritizing “first do no harm” and recognizing interdependencies and trade-offs.
Despite our interlinked reality, our scientific and health systems often operate in silos, complicating efforts to address complex food safety issues. Traditional approaches that prioritize human health over animal and environmental health overlook the all-encompassing nature of disease transmission and control. The complexity of today’s food systems, coupled with the challenges posed by zoonotic diseases and food-borne illnesses, demands a revamped food safety ideology.
Embracing One Health for Enhanced Global Food Safety
While significant progress has been made in food safety, especially in countries like the United States, transformative thinking remains scarce. Consumer demand and retailer initiatives are driving much of the change, underscoring the need for novel frameworks like One Health. The adoption of One Health brings forth the following food safety aspects to the limelight:
Transition to Transdisciplinary Food Safety
The conventional compartmentalization of health domains no longer serves us in addressing these diverse challenges. We must transition from isolated approaches to a transdisciplinary understanding of food safety grounded in the principles of One Health.
Collaborative Learning & Development
The concept of “wicked problems” encapsulates many of the contemporary challenges we face—problems that are interrelated and societal in nature. The emergence of a One Health community of practice offers a platform for synergistic learning and the development of new and state-of-the-art approaches to food safety.
Adapting & Evolving Food Safety Practices
The convergence of human, animal, and environmental health has ushered in a new era of food supply that is becoming susceptible to both intentional and unintentional contamination, necessitating a shift in focus toward the origins of pathogens across different domains. The implementation of One Health offers promising solutions but also poses disruptions to established systems and entrenched beliefs, requiring us to adapt and evolve.
Resolve Ecological and Evolutionary Instabilities
Applying the principles of One Health to our complex food system offers a foundation for understanding ecological and evolutionary instabilities due to the cohabitation of humans, animals, plants, and microbes on our planet, and devising appropriate strategies for the same. The implementation of One Health offers promising solutions but also poses disruptions to established systems and entrenched beliefs, requiring us to adapt and evolve.
Dr. Josh Lederberg, a Nobel Laureate once remarked about the future of humanity’s relationship with microbial infections to be determined by “our wits versus their genes,” which remains the central theme to One Health agenda, underscoring the importance of its application in shaping food safety in the years to come.
Smart Food Safe as an Advocate of One Health
Smart Food Safe is keen to play our part in advancing the goals of One Health by ensuring food safety through digital and tech-enabled solutions in tackling the complexities associated with the globalized food production system described.
Our software can significantly aid in moving to cross-sectoral food safety by working together with various disciplines and data sources on a cloud-based platform, facilitating collaborative learning and development among stakeholders. The software enables the adaptation and evolution of food safety practices by providing real-time monitoring, analytics, and reporting features based on observed insights. It further helps in pinpointing and resolving ecological and evolutionary instabilities in food manufacturing and supply chains by streamlining related processes in such a way as not to be responsible for causing any disruptions in the established ecosystem while ensuring compliance with food safety regulations.
As the distance between “farm” and “fork” continues to expand across diverse local and global sources, Smart Food Safe provides a unified tool to track and manage food production and distribution across these tedious networks.
Food Safety Management Software
Boost your food business’s hygiene standards with Smart Food Safe’s tech-driven solutions—streamline 4C processes to yield optimal results, and ensure compliance effortlessly.