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Final report of the FAO/WHO Regional Conference on Food Safety for Asia and the Pacific |
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Excellencies, honourable guests, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen,
On behalf of Dr JW Lee, Director-General of the World Health Organization, I would like to welcome you to the opening of this FAO/WHO Regional Conference on Food Safety for Asia and the Pacific and join my colleagues from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in thanking the Government of Malaysia for hosting us.
Food safety is of growing concern in all parts of the world, and recent events in Asia and the Pacific has shown us that our region is in no way immune from these concerns.
In all parts of the world, and certainly also in our region, a significant number of people die every year, including many children, as a result of infections they get from the food they eat.
Often in the past, these issues were only brought to the attention of the public when reports of spectacular outbreaks reached the press. This is still true to some extent, but we need to make sure that everybody understands that behind the press news on outbreaks there is a vast number of sporadic cases and small outbreaks which represent a real disease burden related to food. Many of these don’t make it into reporting systems, and they certainly do not make the headlines.
In our region, WHO's general reporting system for causes of death shows that every year more than 700,000 people die from cases of food- and waterborne diarrhoea caused by microorganisms. In addition to diarrhoea, unsafe foods do also cause a number of other types of serious disease, including debilitating long-term effects of certain chemicals naturally occurring or added to foods through our agricultural production systems.
In addition, even though some of the recent public health emergencies in our region, such as Avian flu, Nipah virus and SARS are clearly not foodborne diseases, they are all in some way related to either the way food is produced or how food animals are handled.
Finally, food contamination also impacts on trade and national economies, given that trade barriers and food safety related bans result in major economic losses for exporting countries.
Therefore, there are many good reasons to look into the ways we protect public health through our food production systems and specifically our food safety systems. This Conference comes at an important point in time, and hopefully we can make a difference in moving this important issue forward also within the national priority setting.
As part of our future work, we need to make sure that the public can obtain answers to their questions about the foods they eat. The message that there is always a level of risk related to food sets the magnitude of the problem we need to tackle, but we also need to be able to provide information about what the authorities are doing and what the public itself can do to reduce the possibility of being harmed.
We need to make sure the public understands that if you get a foodborne disease (which I believe most of us have experienced), and you are lucky, the episode may just result in some discomfort for a few days. However, this is not the sole possible consequence: you could also end up with absences from work and further incapacity, or, in a worst case situation, even death.
The outcome of foodborne disease also imposes strains on health systems and reduces economic productivity. Recent estimations from the USA suggest an annual health cost to that society of more than 6 billion dollars from foodborne disease. Such figures do not include further economic losses within production and trade systems.
WHO is the world’s inter-governmental agency that specializes in human health. It helps governments, civil society, consumer groups, private entities, the media and other stakeholders, to access the best possible evidence about the possibility that foods can cause harm, and ways in which that harm can be minimized. This includes ensuring that policy responses are properly informed through surveillance systems and risk analysis, and helping to plan the right mix of information campaigns, legislation, or changes in the safety culture and systems within the food industries.
WHO adds value by helping to integrate different systems for surveillance of illnesses. Approaches to build and strengthen surveillance networks in our region will be discussed at this meeting and we hope that we will be able to move forward in these areas also.
WHO’s mandate to ensure food safety calls for new, evidence-based, preventive strategies in order to lower the risk that food will cause harm. These strategies can be pursued throughout the whole "farm to table" food production chain. In other areas of the world it is getting longer than ever, while in many parts of our region the distance between production and consumption is very short: in our deliberations we should try to ensure that all our different food production systems are covered by future food safety initiatives.
This regional Conference on Food Safety is supported by WHO and FAO working together. Why? Because we need to look at the issues from a multi-disciplinary perspective! Many problems in the past stem from our inability to get all partners and government authorities with responsibility for the different parts of our food production chain to work together. We hope that the FAO/WHO link will also inspire collaboration at the national and international level between agriculture and health and other sectors.
Delegates, now is a good time to scale-up our collective efforts on food safety, initiating evidence collection and country-level surveillance and implementing effective responses, as well as ensuring that the issue is high on the political agenda. We need to share our experiences – good and bad – so that future food safety systems can improve and leap-frog over past mistakes.
I wish you a successful conference, and look forward to the outcome of your deliberations in this critical area of public health.
Thank you.
