Food Safety and Food Security

The safety of food is an important health, social and economic issue. According to the World Health Organization ( WHO), foodborne and waterborne diarrheal diseases kill an estimated 2.2 million people annually, 1.9 million of them are children. Unsafe food can be the cause of or contribute to many diseases, from diarrhea to some cancers, so that food safety, nutrition and food security are among WHO's 13 strategic objectives.

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Food safety also has impact on at least 4 of the 8 millennium development goals set by the United Nations for 2015 eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, reduction of child mortality, improvement of maternal health, and
ensuring of environment stability.

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To ensure safer food for health, WHO also developed training materials called 'Five Keys to Safer Food promoting simple health measures based on evidence from scientific research for use of food handlers, including customers, in order to decrease the burden of foodborne diseases. Food and its safety has become the topic of globally increasing research efforts, particularly in view of the growth of human population.

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Food security, as defined by the United Nations' Committee on World Food Security, means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.

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The interest of the scientific community in food safety is illustrated by the recent special issue of the Science magazine, which explored the potential of science to tackle the challenge of feeding the estimated 9 billion people who will inhabit the Earth by 2050.

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The topic stirred a heated debate on the printed and electronic pages of the journal. The 2011 crisis at a unclear power plant after the earthquake in japan and the detection of radioactivity in certain food samples contributed to the concerns about the safety of food from that area.

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Most recent outbreak of a deadly hemolytic-uremic syndrome in Germany, caused by bacterial contamination of vegetable sprouts, also drew the attention to food safety. In view of the attention of the scientific community to the topic of food,
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I was interested in the scientific evidence for its safety. To assess research published on this topic in the last decade, I searched the Web of Science, bibliographical database that also uses citations to published research as a measure of impact on research community.