A life leading on food safety
Science on the Menu: A Food Safety Podcast by EFSA
European Food Safety Authority
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2024
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
Food safety has come a long way since the years of numerous crises in the 1990s. The EU established an independent risk assessor at EU level and developed new ways of working. But is the current system enough to manage future threats to the health of humans, animals and the environment? Fake news, new technologies, future pandemics – what challenges and opportunities do they bring? Tune in to hear the views of one of the EU's leading figures on food safety.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Science on the menu, a podcast by the European Food Safety Authority. |
| 0:19.6 | Hello and welcome to another episode of Science on the Menu. |
| 0:26.5 | Today we're joined by Bernard Earl, the executive director of the European Food Safety Authority, |
| 0:32.2 | EFSA. I'm really happy to have you on the podcast, Bernard. Welcome. |
| 0:35.7 | Thank you very much, Ed. Thanks for having me. |
| 0:37.9 | So, Burnett, you've been executive director of EFSA now for almost 10 years, and that's actually |
| 0:45.4 | half the lifespan of EFSA, which was set up following a series of food crises in the 90s. If you |
| 0:53.0 | look back at that time in the 90s where I guess the most |
| 0:57.1 | notable food crisis was BSE, known as Mad Cow Disease, what are the changes that you've seen since |
| 1:03.1 | then? How far have we come since that period, dark period, I could almost say, for food safety? |
| 1:08.6 | Let me go back for a moment to the end of the 1990s. |
| 1:12.8 | I was working in food safety in Austria, but not in a public organization. |
| 1:18.0 | And it was the height of the BSE crisis. |
| 1:21.7 | And then they had a big conference in Brussels, only about BSE, you know, with Franz Fissela, with Emma Bonino, |
| 1:29.1 | with all the big shots of the Pryon research. And I was given the allowance to go there. I went |
| 1:36.8 | there, huge conference. And I listened to the guys, the virologists and the epidemiologists. And then |
| 1:43.8 | it was like opening my eyes and I thought, |
| 1:46.9 | we have to do something different in the future. I thought it for Austria. We have to do something |
| 1:52.1 | different. We cannot continue like that. We need something more holistic. We need an independent |
| 1:57.9 | risk assessment. We need different risk communication. And that was then |
| 2:02.6 | introduced on the European level with our founding regulation. It was a real paradigm change, |
| 2:10.1 | meaning that the owners for food safety was put on the food business operators, and EFSA was founded. |
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