The microbial safety of Canada's food and water is one of the Institute of Infection and Immunity's top research priorities. To galvanize research in the area, the Institute is spearheading the formation of a national coalition dedicated to the coordination of a safe food and water research agenda for Canada. This initiative is a follow-up to the June 2000 CIHR Opportunity Fund Workshop on Food Safety at which researchers from a variety of different disciplines and sectors came together for the first time to discuss research priorities in the area.
By chance, the opportunity fund workshop took place just days after the contaminated water disaster in Walkerton, Ont. that claimed seven lives and made more than 2,000 people ill. "Thus," says Dr. Brett Finlay, one of the organizers of the workshop, "everyone had a heightened sense of awareness and an appreciation of the necessity of preventing future outbreaks." Finlay has studied food and water pathogens extensively. "I was concerned about the lack of coordination of research at all levels dealing with food and water safety," he says. While the United States has had national surveillance systems in place since 1996 to collect data on issues of food and water safety, Canada has no parallel organization. Finlay says he was also frustrated by the lack of communication and coordination between basic researchers and government and public health offices, and the lack of translation of findings into applications. At the workshop, more than 30 scientists and policy makers from Canadian universities, government agencies and industry convened for discussions that turned out to be "amazingly frank" according to Finlay.
Dr. Judith Bray, the Institute's Assistant Director, Special Projects, has taken the workshop recommendations, which included the formation of a national research network, from their preliminary stages to their status today. The first step was a meeting held on Oct. 31, 2001 and attended by 17 representatives from the federal agriculture, health and environmental sectors, the food and water industry, and federal granting agencies. As a result of this meeting a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is about to be signed among 15 of the 17 members, defining an agreement to coordinate a national research agenda for food and water safety.
The parties to the MOU are now preparing a Request for Applications (RFA) for research in two related areas-the microbial safety of food and water, and antimicrobial resistance in the food chain. The RFA will lay a framework for the coordination of Canadian research by combining the strengths, resources and expertise of researchers from multiple sectors. Research teams responding to the RFA will be comprised of scientists from federal departments, universities, and possibly industry, working in collaboration. According to Bray, this represents an exciting approach to public health issues that will reduce research duplication and help to establish cooperation and partnership among these sectors.
The above RFA will extend the strategic initiatives relating to food and water safety launched by the Institute in May 2002, in collaboration with its CIHR partners and two Networks of Centres of Excellence: the Canadian Bacterial Diseases Network and the Canadian Water Network, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
