Social media can help a food scare grow, but it also lets scientists work together more easily, writes JOANNE HUNT
ARE THE animals we eat fed too many antibiotics? Was social media as virulent as the pathogens themselves in escalating the recent E.coli outbreak?
Experts from all over Europe are gathering in Dublin this week to ruminate on such food safety questions and while there’s no telling if delegates will be lunching on cucumbers or bean sprouts, recent scares have provided them with plenty of food for thought.
“Killer cucumbers, those were the headlines,” says Prof Alan Reilly of Ireland’s Food Safety Authority of the recent E.coli outbreak.
Reilly’s address to the Society for Applied Microbiology conference is all about managing a food safety crisis when instant social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, make controlling the flow of information to the public a challenge.
Reilly says the effect of social media, where a story can spread like wildfire, becoming more exaggerated with the telling without any editorial control, can be damaging.
“If you get a message like that from a friend on Twitter or Facebook, you’re not going to buy cucumbers and you’re not going to eat them. That has the net effect of crippling an industry.”
So how do Europe’s national food bodies keep pace? “With extreme difficulty,” he admits.
“Not only is the food industry exposed to great risk from social media, but the food control services are also in a position where a journalist will have more up-to-date information than the food safety authorities.
“If we are trying to put out a public health message that a food is safe or don’t eat that food, sometimes it’s already out there before we can actually verify it.”
He cites the recent E.coli outbreak in Germany, which grew to be the largest food-borne illness incident in Europe, as a case in point.
“Look what happened to the Germans, they went out and said, ‘Yes, it was the Spanish cucumber’, when it wasn’t. If you do get it wrong, you are really in trouble,” he says.
So while social media might have taken its lead from Hamburg health officials, was Germany too quick to put the results of preliminary tests into the public domain?
Reilly’s advice is to proceed with caution when releasing information because the digital and traditional media have not been able to effectively reverse the damage to those products as swiftly as their reputation was decimated in the first instance.
With some 150,000 tons of Spanish fruit and vegetables piling up every week at the height of the scare and losses running at €200 million a week, it’s no wonder Spain is looking for compensation.
But the effects of social media in a food crisis aren’t all bad, according to Reilly. Many scientists shared information through social networks to great effect during the recent incident.
“It was the first time it happened that social media networks contributed to the identification of the genetic make-up of this organism,” he says. “So we knew it was a new strain, it had certain virulent characteristics and that was all done by scientists sharing information on social media. There was a Chinese laboratory leading it and everybody else was feeding into it, 24 hours a day.”
Though the social networks Reilly refers to are informal ones established by scientists and one developed by the World Health Organisation (Who), such online forums harnessed the global science community in minutes. “Finding the DNA sequence of the organism would have taken two or three years [in the past], this time it took two days,” he says.
Also addressing the conference is Dr Hilde Kruse, a Who food safety expert who is warning that antibiotic resistance in the most common forms of food poisoning is being passed to humans from food animals.
Used in treatment, disease prevention and in some areas outside the EU for growth promotion, antibiotics can promote the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in an animal’s intestines.
“This bacteria can then contaminate the food products,” says Kruse.
“In the slaughter house, bacteria from the intestine can contaminate the surface of the meat or when you milk a dairy cow, the bacteria can contaminate the udder of the cow.”
She says the antibiotic-resistant bacteria are then passed to humans through poorly cooked meat, cross-contamination of food by raw meat or consuming un-pasteurised milk products.
The result is human infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as salmonella and campylobacter that is difficult or impossible to treat.
About 25,000 people die from antibiotic resistant infections each year in the EU. Effluent from farms where animals have antibiotic-resistant bacteria is also a problem when contaminated water is used to irrigate crops.
While consumers should cook food thoroughly, avoid cross-contamination from raw meat in the kitchen, wash their hands and ensure fruit and vegetables are washed thoroughly too, the problem also requires vets, food producers and health authorities to work more closely together, according to Kruse.
“Antibiotics should only be used when really necessary and only when prescribed by a vet,” she says.
“We must also reduce the need for antibiotics.
“The better the environment for the animal, with good hygiene and feeding practices, the less prone to sickness they will be and with less need for antibiotics.”