The Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN) issued a food warning this week on several brands of white ice cream sold at Mercadona, Lidl and Aldi. The three companies are already informing their customers of the problem and are working on the recall of affected products.

There are many food warnings throughout the year.. For example, 357 in 2020. However, it is relatively common to find ourselves in the press (or networks) with calls for returns on certain products, especially during the summer months when daily news is scarce. But beyond the question in question (stick pieces found in some references), there’s something interesting: we’re not talking about ice cream in a particular store; We’re talking about thousands of ice creams available in more than 2,500 stores distributed across the country.

In other words, talk about a system designed to detect, report and correct “direct or indirect risks to human health from food products”. In other words, we are talking about SCIRI.

Protecting ourselves from risks in an increasingly complex world. Years ago, consumption ceased to be a very local issue. On the contrary, the ‘common market’ (the movement of goods, services and people across the continent) is one of the central points of the European Union. The problem is, it’s a monumental mess. At European level, consumer, industrial and healthcare competencies are distributed in a wide variety of ways, so we need a way to coordinate them.

In fact, in Spain alone, there are almost twenty institutions, associations or companies with ‘competences’ in the world of health alerts, in addition to AESAN (Spanish Food, Health and Nutrition Agency) and regional organisations. And this can become a problem as the world gets more complex.

SCIRI and alert network. This is exactly what the Coordinated Information Exchange System (SCIRI) is trying to solve, ensuring that all information gets where it needs to be. Looking at the data, we seem to have been successful. A few years ago, Moya and Ferrer (from the toxicology field of the University of Valencia) decided to provide figures on this development and conducted a study on the evolution of food alerts from the Coordinated System for Rapid Information Exchange. His data has made us optimistic: warnings have decreased by about 5% per year, despite an increase in risks from free movement of products across the European Union.

But the problems still persist. However, as we’ve seen in recent years, the risk is still there. Cases of poor handling practices (lack of hygiene, training issues, etc.), limitations in control systems (poor assessment of the risks and hazards of industrial processes), contamination (due to lack of ‘food defence’) and fraud continue. creates many food problems.

What happens if a health warning arrives? SCIRI operates with three levels of urgency or reliability: alerts (alert notifications where prompt action is required or may be required by the relevant authorities), information (notifications that do not require prompt action), news (where possible, the alert has not been confirmed by official sources).

In the case of the most dangerous warning, the product is tracked by tracking records and batch numbers. From this moment, appropriate actions are initiated for immobilization (if in the distribution chain), withdrawal (for products in stores but not marketed), recovery (if already in the hands of consumers). ). This last one is undoubtedly the most complicated part.

The same North American FDA acknowledged in 2019 that this is one of the big issues pending. And in the United States, about 48 million people (1 in 6 Americans) get sick from preventable food poisoning each year. 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. Comparatively, the situation in Europe is significantly better, but on the continent more than 500 people die from preventable poisoning.

The greatest hits, yes; but many tasks waiting. Of course we have made progress. Things like installing QR codes on the packaging to always check the status of each product with a mobile phone make information accessible, but the truth is that the authorities’ efforts to reduce the risks on this side are not what they used to be. And as an agri-food power, it wouldn’t hurt to lead this change.

Image | ATP