World Health Day 2015
NewsCorporate
Food safety: a shared responsibility
In 2015, World Health Day, which is organised by the World Health Organization (WHO), is dedicated to food safety. On this occasion, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) calls on everybody to contribute to keeping food safe, including governments, industry, producers, academia, consumers and medicines regulators.
According to WHO, food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances is responsible for more than 200 diseases, ranging from diarrhoea to cancer. As our food supply becomes increasingly globalised new threats are constantly emerging. It is estimated that two million deaths occur every year from contaminated food or drinking water.
EMA contributes to food safety through various activities.
Safe food comes from healthy animals and EMA promotes animal health through the evaluation and recommendation for marketing authorisation of a wide range of veterinary medicines that are of high quality, effective and safe to the animal, the consumer, the user and the environment.
An area of concern for EMA is the relatively low number of veterinary vaccines available in the EU. These medicines are essential to prevent the development of a wide range of diseases that can affect food safety. A recent workshop held on 25 March 2015 at EMA brought together key stakeholders to debate the authorisation of veterinary vaccines in the EU and to identify what needs to be done to make more vaccines available whilst maintaining the current, high level of protection of animal health, public health and the environment. EMA and the heads of national competent authorities responsible for the regulation of veterinary medicines will now develop and implement an action plan to tackle the obstacles identified at the workshop.
Ensuring that food is not contaminated with residues of veterinary medicines that might represent a risk to the consumer is also an important element of food safety. EMA plays a key role in this area by assessing the safety of drug residues present in food-producing animals and by establishing maximum residue limits (MRLs), which are safe levels of medicine-derived residues in food produced from treated animals. In the EU no veterinary medicine is allowed to be placed on the market or used unless MRLs have been established. Over the years MRLs have been established for almost 900 substances.
EMA is also very active in the area of minimising the risk to human health arising through the use of antimicrobials in animals. Antimicrobials, particularly antibiotics, are essential to treat infections caused by bacteria in food-producing animals to ensure that the food derived from them is safe to consume. However, any use of antimicrobials brings with it the potential to select for antimicrobial-resistant bacteria that may be transmitted to humans via food.
In the context of the European Commission Action plan on antimicrobial resistance, EMA is helping to develop strategies and possible solutions. These include the monitoring of the consumption of antibiotics used in animals in EU Members States, the adoption of recommendations to promote the responsible use of certain veterinary antibiotics, especially those that are critically important for human medicine, and the development of recommendations to the European Commission to minimise the risk of transmission of resistance from animals to humans.
EMA is also supporting efforts to harmonise the authorisation of veterinary medicines across the world in order to increase quality, safety and effectiveness of medicines for animals. This is the aim of the International Cooperation on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Veterinary Medicinal Products (VICH) and in particular its 'Outreach Forum'. This initiative, in which EMA is involved, allows other countries and regions to benefit from the work already done, reduces repetition of efforts and promotes the global acceptance of common standards and requirements in relation to veterinary medicines.
World Health Day is celebrated on 7 April every year to mark the anniversary of the founding of WHO in 1948. It provides an opportunity to highlight WHO's priority areas of public health.