Foodborne disease and the preventive role of food irradiation

I rom the beginning, all civilizations have had to evolve systems for ensuring adequate supplies of safe and nutritious food to meet the needs of their people. Ideally, such supplies would be of high quality, be comprised of a wide variety of food items, and be affordable to even the most disadvantaged members of society. To meet their food requirements, people have had to cope with a number of constraints. They include variations in agro-climatic conditions, insufficient technical knowledge, inadequate infrastructure, seasonality of production, and the perishable nature of most food products. While diverse solutions to overcome these difficulties have been devised, it may be said that adequate food supplies have only been achieved with some reliance on food processing and preservation technologies. This is particularly true of the contemporary world, where a growing proportion of the population now live in urban areas. The technologies for safely keeping food include a variety of processes. Some of them, such as drying and salting, are of considerable antiquity, while others, such as fumigation, canning, freezing, and pasteurization, are of more recent origin. Treatment by ionizing radiation now is beginning to be used to supplement existing technologies for certain applications. One particular application, which has considerable public health benefits, is the reduction of pathogenic micro-organisms in foods. As a process used to meet quarantine requirements, irradiation holds great promise as an alternative to chemical fumigation and other physical methods for disinfestation.