Paul Brierley full interview

CAITLIN: Welcome back I’m here with Paul Brierley who is the Executive Director of the Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture. Paul thank you for joining us today. Start out by telling us for those that don’t a little bit about that the Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture does.

PAUL: So we were formed as a joint public private partnership between the University of Arizona and the Ag industry so I work directly for the vice president and dean of the college of agriculture at the U of A but I have an advisory council of donors, stakeholders in the agriculture industry that support our center and they advise me on topics really need attention to and really need solutions to, these pressing problems that they need solutions to. And then we basically go out and try to engage researchers who will work on those problems and find funding and resources and work closely with them to get answers to these problems.

CAITLIN: In light of the recent E. Coli outbreaks in romaine lettuce how has research changed at the center since these recalls?

PAUL: Right, so there is a lot of researchers who work on food safety so that in the past has not been a real focus of ours. The University of Arizona is very much on the ground with cooperative extension researchers who work with water testing and water quality and look at all of these food safety aspects. There is a whole group at the U of A that is the Food Safety Coalition. What we did with these outbreaks and this crisis that was facing the industry is we gathered together with our donors and researchers from the college and the Center for Produce Safety and basically said how can we help move things forward? We are focused more on trying to do that. There are really four areas that need advancing. You need avoidance or prevention. You need detection so you know when there is a problem before it enters the food supply or before you harvest it. You need trace back when there is a problem and then the holy grail is to find a kill step that would work on these. As you may have thought about there is no pasteurization that you can do. You can’t heat treat it. So those four areas are places we are really trying to help with.

CAITLIN: Are these situation inevitable? Are we bound to have these E Coli outbreaks every now and then or is there a way for us to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

PAUL: We could probably say that we cannot say we would never have this problem again because as you can see we are out in the open environment. There are birds and wildlife, pets and people, water that’s coming into the fields. All of these potential sources for contamination. What we can do again are the four areas I talked about. We are really trying to avoid it and detect it. There are a lot of different ways to do that. Especially since 2006 when there was an outbreak the industry has taken huge strides in what they do. A lot of research is focused on it. These outbreaks have refocused everyone on it and really put a lot of work into what is happening, why is it happening and how can it be prevented. Is it inevitable that this will always happen? There will always be some risk and all we can do is increase or decrease the chances of that happening.

CAITLIN: Gosh how is it that we had two recalls happen within the same year in the same type of produce?

PAUL: I think it is just luck of the draw or bad luck of the draw. They were two completely separate areas of the country. Two separate strains of E. Coli. So they were not related in that sense but I think bad luck of the draw and I think also people are much more in tune to that now when there is someone that gets ill. They report it to their doctor so it’s being watched more closely and I think and I think it is being picked up more closely. If you think about it there are hundreds of millions of servings of salad every day and so really the number of people getting sick, even during an outbreak is very small in comparison to that number. I think it is kind of a needle in the haystack to realize that illnesses are connected but everybody; the FDA, CDC, the medical community is getting better at tying things together and that’s a good thing. We quickly realize that there is a problem and then you can get that food out of the food supply. It’s been a tough year. You see the fields behind us and just how much effort goes into making sure this food is safe. People’s minds would be boggled about how much goes into making sure it is safe and how much research is going into to make us ever better at avoiding that.

CAITLIN: Tell us about some of those precautions people are taking in the Ag industry?

PAUL: In general they do all sorts of things: Training of workers, documenting the training, anything that happens with the crop. They look for any incursion like animals or bird droppings or any footprints and if there is something like that found they don’t harvest an area around that. There was a recent article in the paper I might reiterate. If you go out here and grab a head of this romaine that’s going to lead to the harvesters seeing a footprint and they will not harvest a 50 foot area around that footprint and not harvest that lettuce. One thing we are working with is technology and even military contractors who do high technology for other applications. Maybe they are looking for anthrax for terrorism attacks or something like that and can we fine tune that to where we can detect real time when a harvester goes through or at the processing plant if there is a problem and keep that out of the food supply. So there is a whole mix. There is a lot of water testing going on, product testing just so that if there is a problem it is found. Those areas of avoidance, detection and preferable real time detection, trace back and a kill step are really the areas that the industry is working on.

CAITLIN: What do you feel the public needs to know about food safety and what is being done now to keep people safe?

PAUL: I think people perceive that we don’t do anything. That we just go out and pick the lettuce and sell it but I think they would be amazed that again how much water testing goes on, product testing, training of employees, how much cleanliness with chlorine and hand washing. The million dollar machines that are out here because they are made of stainless steel so that you don’t have pathogens on them. A lot of work goes into it and as of these outbreaks there is a lot more going into it and a lot of research going into more tools for them to be able to avoid it so the key thing is I know the farmers personally that grow this stuff and they feed it to their families. They love the fact that it’s a healthy product and people are healthier for eating it and the real danger is eating less salad and so just know that they are doing everything possible so that it’s a safe product and we don’t have recurrence.

CAITLIN: Thank you Paul for joining us today and helping us learn more about what is being done to prevent these situations from happening.