Food Safety
The safety of foods has been an ongoing concern since before the discovery of microorganisms. Reports of food-borne illness date back to the beginning of the consumption of food. Likely many a caveperson suffered from a tainted meal. The earliest reports concerned deaths attributed to the consumption of sausages contaminated with Clostridium botulinum ( Erbguth and Naumann, 1999). Many events in history have been impacted by food-borne illness. In the USA, Salmonella may have led to the death of Zachary Taylor, the 12th President, after eating at the picnic for the ground breaking of the Washington Monument in 1850. Food-borne illness is highly underestimated, especially as individual cases spread over wide geographic regions and are often left unrecognized because they are not linked together. The efforts to improve the safety of the food supply are never-ending and dynamic, as the population ages, immune systems are compromised (as in the case of some diseases), and there is growing recognition that food-borne illness does not end when the gastrointestinal events subside.