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UN warns Asia-Pacific faces acute food safety risk; ‘danger just round the corner’

UN warns Asia-Pacific faces acute food safety risk; ‘danger just round the corner’

Ducks sold at poultry market in Hanoi
With one person dying every 45 seconds from food- and water-borne diseases in Asia and the Pacific alone, the area faces serious risks in densely populated zones, two United Nations agencies said today at the start of a regional meeting seeking to head off future threats to public health and international trade.

“So far, food contamination incidents and food-borne disease outbreaks in the region have been relatively isolated, but the potential danger is just round the corner,” according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO). “Already an estimated one in three people worldwide suffer annually from a food-borne disease and 1.8 million die from severe food and waterborne diarrhoea.”

In Asia and the Pacific, more than 700,000 people die and many more are debilitated every year from single cases of food- and water-borne disease – single cases that most often do not hit press headlines.

“The danger of food-related outbreaks is particularly acute in Asia and the Pacific, because of the instances in which animals and people live in proximity and the way in which some food is produced and distributed,” WHO Assistant Director-General for Food Safety Kerstin Leitner said.

The bird flu epidemic earlier this year – the most recent example of a disease linking food, animals and human health – has been historically unprecedented and of great concern for human health as well as for agriculture, with 23 fatal human cases and about 100 million birds dead or culled.

Food safety officials and experts from some 40 countries are participating in the four-day Regional Conference on Food Safety under FAO and WHO auspices in Seremban, Malaysia.

Trade disruptions due to poor food quality have also been on the increase, including unacceptable pesticide residue levels in fruits and vegetables and antibiotic residues in seafood and poultry. A ban on fish imports into the European Union cost one Asian country $335 million in lost export.

Recent scandals with life threatening sub-standard or chemically contaminated food are just the tip of the iceberg of a widespread and growing public health problem, symptomatic of safety systems not properly working and of the lack of integrated mechanisms to predict potential outbreaks and organize rapid responses to prevent them, the agencies warned.