Science on the menu, a podcast by the European Food Safety Authority.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Science on the Menu.

Today joining me is Eleonora Sarano from the biological monitoring team at EFSA.

Welcome to the podcast, Eleonora.

Hello, hi.

So today we're going to be talking about what happens when people get sick from food. So we're

going to be talking about foodborne disease outbreaks, food safety incidents. And on June the 7th around

the world, we celebrate World Food Safety Day. And the theme this year is prepare for the unexpected,

the unexpected being food safety incidents that can happen.

So we're going to be talking about what the EU does to respond, and particularly what EFSA does, and that's where you come in.

So first, Eleonora, can you give us some background?

What are the kind of different types of food safety incident that can occur? And what is a food safety incident?

Yes, sure.

So a food born outbreak simply and unexpected and unpleasant event

that happens when two or more people can experience the same

disease after having ingested the same contaminated food. So, you know, food can be contaminated

by microorganism, that can be viruses, bacteria, but also by chemical compounds. So whenever this food is eaten by two or more people, then this can cause the infections

and people may experience a different variety of symptoms.

And these symptoms can be mild to severe symptoms and they depend on the pathogen and also on some other characteristics of the

individual of the people. So this is where is a foodborne outbreak and this is where we work in

EFSA to, indeed, to evaluate to assess these foodborne outbreaks and to see whether the local events that happen

in the countries and national level can evolve into bigger events.

...