Food Safety Databases: A New Challenge - Food Safety Magazine

"The widespread move from global food supply chains to food supply networks presents considerable challenges that call for a re-evaluation of our approaches to food safety. Currently, the advances in globalization of the food supply network have outstripped our regional safety processes and procedures, as exemplified by the absence of a global food safety authority. Many recent events in food safety have demonstrated the need to remain vigilant and maintain appropriate state-of-the-art testing facilities. New approaches are being developed to provide timely notification based on a wide range of methods, from early warning systems, prediction and forecasting methods to psychological investigations to combat fraudulent practices. The major current emphases could be summarized as the necessity to move to pre-emptive intelligence gathering to attain more coherent regulation of a widening network supply against diminishing regulatory resources ...  Network analytical tools (NATs) are based on a meaningful relationship between two 'nodes' (e.g., countries or suppliers) with edges (or connections) having weights (e.g., number of food safety reports or supply transactions). In our approach, we set producer nations of faulty foods as Transgressors and policing nations as Detectors. By extracting database content, network analysis has the key advantages of capturing complexity and analyzing trends, along with ease of use and speed. Thus, we built the first NAT to facilitate data mining to investigate country interactions (Transgressors and Detectors) by time, source identified and chemical groups to provide complex trend data along with subtle underlying information. An example of the output is provided in Figure 1. The key features are the ability to select type of notification (on top left) and the network map showing Detector nations in green and Transgressor nations in red. Finally, the timeline shows trends in detection (green) and transgressions (red) for the selected nation. Thus, in Figure 1, Germany has been selected as the nation of interest for 'every alert' and the timeline shows it is predominantly a Detector nation over the period. The food safety NAT is designed for simplicity and for use by those with different language abilities. The nation of interest can be selected by clicking on its label in the network map or via the drop-down menu above the trend line.    An example of the flexibility of the NAT is given in Figure 2, where Brazil is identified as salmon pink in 2005 in 'every alert' mode. This denotes moderate Transgressor activity when all notifications are considered. On the list below the timeline, the Transgressor index is 42.4. A rapid switch to “bacteria” mode reveals a move to bright red, showing that Brazil has a spike in transgressions for this category at the time selected. The Transgressor index now reads 408.4, revealing that it is a major contributor at this time point for transgressions caused by bacteria.  In a similar fashion, the database can be interrogated for any country at any time point for any of the selected categories (every alert, metals, microorganisms, mycotoxins and border rejections). Once a selection is made, the NAT responds by rearranging to deliver the NAT plot, trend line and index data.  NAT’s advantages are that it affords a user-friendly appraisal of a database, being capable of handling a high level of complexity and providing outputs in minutes. The NAT readily demonstrates which countries are Transgressors and Detectors at a time point of interest and category of alert. It can also demonstrate the impact of each nation, using algorithms such as those used by Internet search engines. Many more applications of the NAT are provided in our published research, many of which are open access.[1–7]   The current NAT is in prototype form on open access, along with a short set of instructions (staffnet.kingston.ac.uk/~ku36087/foodalert/). The Java freeware is required to run the NAT. Following a recent stakeholder engagement to design a final flexible NAT, work is underway to develop the live-feed tool ..."