A major food safety issue that has existed for a while was the limited standard of methods to track foodborne pathogens in food. With the ever increasing advancement of technology, it is quickly changing the speed of testing process. The downside, however is that it also can complicate things.
With the government lowering expenses in regards to food safety, they miss out on the newest advances that come from academic institutions and laboratories within the private and non-profit sectors. In other to combat this issue, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have come up with a competition in the coming months that looks to bridge the gap between the public and private sectors. The competition challenges are designed and will hopefully spur creativity in the field of pathogen detection which will help these government agencies learn more about the communities of academics, entrepreneurs and others who do not work for government labs. In the end, this will hopefully lead to a healthier and safer America.
One of the main focuses during the competition is to find a new and more effective way to detect Salmonella in fresh produce. With a pool prize of US$500,000, the FDA hopes that this will spur scientists, entrepreneurs and academics outside government walls who may not traditionally work in food safety but still have potential to expand FDA’s food testing capabilities and efforts to maintain a safe food supply.
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