Terrorist threats to food: guidance for establishing and strengthening prevention and response systems

Overview

The malicious contamination of food for terrorist purposes is a real and current threat, and deliberate contamination of food at one location could have global public health implications. This document responds to increasing concern in Member States that chemical, biological or radionuclear agents might be used deliberately to harm civilian populations and that food might be a vehicle for disseminating such agents. The Fifty-fifth World Health Assembly (May 2002) also expressed serious concern about such threats and requested the Organization to provide tools and support to Member States to increase the capacity of national health systems to respond.

Outbreaks of both unintentional and deliberate foodborne disease can be managed by the same mechanisms. Sensible precautions, coupled with strong surveillance and response capacity, constitute the most efficient and effective way of countering all such emergencies, including food terrorism. This document provides guidance to Member States for integrating consideration of deliberate acts of food sabotage into existing programmes for controlling the production of safe food. It also provides guidance on strengthening existing communicable disease control systems to ensure that surveillance, preparedness and response systems are sufficiently sensitive to meet the threat of any food safety emergency. Establishment and strengthening of such systems and programmes will both increase Member States’ capacity to reduce the increasing burden of foodborne illness and help them to address the threat of food terrorism. The activities undertaken by Member States must be proportional to the size of the threat, and resources must be allocated on a priority basis.