New UN campaign focuses on food safety

The United Nations launched a food safety campaign on Tuesday for an era in which millions are dying of hunger or tainted produce as more and more people fall ill from eating too much.

"Food safety, quality and quantity must go together," said Margaret Chan, director-general of the UN World Health Organization.

She was speaking at the Rungis wholesale market in Paris, where she launched World Health Day 2015 under the theme: "From farm to plate, make food safe."

Millions around the world wage a daily battle to obtain safe food, and the WHO says about 2 million people die each year from food-borne and waterborne diseases.

On its long production chain, food can be contaminated by viruses, bacteria, parasites or chemicals, sometimes from polluted water. Tainted food causes more than 200 diseases ranging in severity from diarrhea to cancers.

According to initial figures from a WHO report due to be released later this year, about 582 million people suffered from 22 different food-borne diseases in 2010, and 351,000 died.

More than 40 percent of people who fell ill were children under 5, and poor countries, particularly in Africa, were hardest hit.

Unsafe food also posed major economic risks, according to a WHO statement.

An E. coli outbreak in Germany in 2011 reportedly caused $1.3 billion in losses for farmers and industry, and brought $236 million in emergency aid payments to 22 European Union member states.

"Countries must come up with the right policies and the right systems for prevention and control at source," Chan said.

But Bernard Vallat, director-general of the World Organization for Animal Health, said more than 100 countries still have no legislation to align domestic policies with international food safety standards.

Another major problem is hunger placing people at risk of killer pathogens, like the Ebola virus, carried by animals they eat or come in contact with in the pursuit of food.

Referring to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Chan said, "When there is no food security, meaning people are not sure if they are going to get food, ... they go into the forest to hunt for bush meat."

At the other end of the nutrition scale, overeating is becoming an ever-bigger challenge for health authorities.

"Eating the wrong type of nutrition - high energy, high fat - can give you heart disease, diabetes and of course obesity," Chan said.

(China Daily 04/08/2015 page1)