Food poisoning

Risks don't always attack you sneakily from outside such as traffic accidents or some kinds of disasters. There is actually a risk that becomes obvious inside your bodies before you know. It's food. To put aside poisonous foods like a sort of toadstool or a part of fugu(globefish)'s organ, some people don't care about the safety of food so much. Instead, they are rather concerned about its taste and calories for diets. For vegetables regarded as that healthy, you can't eat some of them if you are notified how much agricultural chemical is adhered on the surface of vegetables or how many carcinogenic substances are included.

What concerns you about the risks is food poisoning. The number of food poisoning in Japan, which had once dropped, has been on the rise suddenly since 1996. This increase was due to the outbreak of E-coli. It was called domestically O-157, a strain of bacteria. The food poisoning was having a nationwide impact on not only Japanese people but also any foodstuff. Although there is an alteration in counting the number of the cases, you need the greatest cares especially in summer.

The most serious case in food poisoning recently is the one caused by an established food company in June,2000. There were more than 14,000 people who suffered from the poisoning in the case. Exactly saying, a dairy product the food company produced was contaminated by a bacteria because of the negligence of cleaning the production bulb. Afterward, it was discovered that the company reused returned dairy products for producing new one. What was worse, there were company’s insincere attitudes such as false reports to the public or selfish remarks of the top manager. Now that companies are open to societies, any of them has to disclose the minimum information to consumers, particularly on the safety of products. Otherwise, consumers can’t response so quickly that more people will be victimized. In this sense, if the food company had disclosed the fact accurately and more quickly, there would not have ended up such a serious case.

Food-related risks are serious not only in Japan but also oversees. BSE(Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) or so called mad cow disease is striking one. Infected cows behave extraordinarily because the brains become like sponge. Originally, this is the disease only seen in sheep. But, since the bones of sheep were used for the food of cows in the UK, the cows that eat the food have been infected by the disease. And then, the caws were used as meat-and-bone for feeding caws themselves. Finally as food chain goes, it was pointed out that there was the possibility of infecting human. Actually, seeing a big sum of the human victims, the British government recognized the human infection in 1996. The caw meat industry has been devastated by the food crisis because many of European people don’t want to eat the meat of cows for the fear of infection.

In Japan too, since the first mad caw decease in caws was found in September 2001, the government has taken countermeasures against it such as banning to import meat-and-bone, severe inspections on caws before going to the markets. Although this is second-guessing, the authority should have taken the countermeasures much earlier because it recognized the risk shortly after the uproars in Europe.

Food is essential for our life. Needless to say, we can’t live without it. Different from outside shocks, the risk of food is, in a way, more serious because we put it into stomachs. We have to take the greatest cares about food all the more. In reality, however, we seem to be losing a sense of risk since we eat food everyday as a matter of course in many countries today. We are rather looking for more delicious food instead of the fundamental safety. What is more, like Japan , which relies on foreign counties for food, the situation is much more serious. Particularly nowadays, genetically modified food has been becoming prevail. Despite of strict regulations on the safety of importing food, it’s deniable that Japan is facing much risk from now on.

The number of Food Poisoning

Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare