Food-Borne Disease Prevention and Risk Assessment 2.0 Edition

Dear Colleagues,

A Special Issue of Foods entitled “Food-Borne Disease Prevention and Risk Assessment 2.0 Edition” is currently being organized. Despite the continuous improvements in food safety systems and the strengthening of control measures by government and industry, foodborne disease remains unexpectedly high in both developed and developing nations. For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that one in six persons in the United States suffers from gastroenteritis each year, with up to 3000 fatalities arising from the consumption of contaminated food. According to the WHO Initiative to Estimate the Global Burden of Foodborne Diseases, 31 global hazards caused 600 million foodborne illnesses and 420,000 deaths in 2010, and diarrheal disease agents were the leading cause of these in most regions. These are astonishing figures for the 21^st century as most foodborne diseases are preventable, yet their burden is also increasing with the global threat of antibiotic resistance. We are familiar with some of the underlying conditions: unsafe water used for the cleaning, production, and processing of food, poor husbandry practices, food production processes, inadequate storage, and food handling practices including infected food workers and cross-contamination of food. These can be coupled with inadequate or poorly enforced regulatory standards and industry compliance. However, knowledge of these is not enough. Making advances in prevention and control practices requires a suite of interlinked actions from improvements in the investigation of complaints and illnesses to finding the root cause of outbreaks; applying rapid and accurate identification of the hazards present; determining the conditions in which pathogens grow and multiply in order to eliminate or reduce these numbers; developing targeted intervention strategies; understanding human behavior with respect to food processing and preparation with recommendations for change; producing effective educational and training programs; evaluating the risks of existing, novel, and modified food production and preparation practices; predicting how effective potential interventions would be; and introducing effective, practical, and enforceable codes of practice for the different harvesting, processing, and preparing industry components.

This Special Issue is open to submissions in the subject area of food-borne disease prevention and risk assessment. For detailed information on the journal, I refer you to https://www.mdpi.com/journal/foods.

Prof. Dr. Ewen C. D. Todd
Dr. Dima Faour-Klingbeil
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Foods is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• foodborne disease surveillance and monitoring
• representative surveillance sites such as FoodNet
• expert elicitation
• food attribution
• social media to collect illness data
• foodborne disease outbreak investigations
• determining root cause analysis
• improved surveillance
• estimating cases and burden of foodborne diseases
• rapid communication of food contamination/food poisoning issues prevention and control strategies
• the role of food codes including Codex Alimentarius
• national and local standards, guidelines, and regulations
• industry association studies and recommendations
• prerequisite programs/sanitation
• hazard analysis critical control points
• food safety objectives, performance objectives, etc.
• novel pathogen inactivation methods
• trend analysis/statistical process control
• traceback/blockchain along the food chain microbiological testing and identification
• whole genome sequencing
• culture independent diagnostic testing the human element
• food safety education and worker training
• food safety culture and trust
• understanding behavior of food preparers
• exploring artificial intelligence risk analysis
• quantitative microbiological risk assessment
• qualitative risk assessment
• risk profiles
• predictive modeling
• dose response assessment
• exposure assessment
• risk management
• risk communication
• future of the risk assessment process