EC Microbiology

Since 2010, in a NATO workshop in Cairo, April 13-15, entitled "Advances in food security and safety against terrorist threats and natural disasters". Under this topic, I introduced a lecture with a title of "Bacterial gastrointestinal infections and food poisoning" which included the bad direct and indirect microbial impact on humans, animals, and the environment, especially if there was bad faith that amounted to the levels of local or global terrorism. This workshop included three main themes: Food safety challenges, preventive measurements and strategies, and emerging technologies to improve food safety and security. These lectures were delivered by 17 lecturers from many countries of the world. The main topics of these lectures were as follow: NATO-SPS pilot study “food chain security”/findings and recommendations, challenges to food safety and security in the European union, food borne bacteria; their impact on food safety, higher risk of health problems for radio-contaminated food consumption by human population suffering protein-calorie malnutrition and environmental chemical pollution, chemical pollutants threatening food safety and security, protection of the global food supply, food safety: global problem as a challenge for the future activities, industry response to food crisis/availability of shelf-stable foods, establishing data base for food products/ingredients to strengthen readiness in food terrorism attack, establishing traceability standards and procedures for processed foods, tamper evident packaging and radio frequency identification (RFID) for food protection in logistics and distribution, new intervention systems to improve food safety using naturally-occurring antimicrobials, achieving food safety in ready-to-eat meat and poultry products, different mycotoxin inactivation applications and their inactivation mechanisms, pulsed electric field processing to better preserve health related compounds, emerging risks related to food technology, achieving total food protection-benefits from integrating food safety and food defense programs". All of these titles are suitable to be investigations and topics for research and study at the laboratory level or survey studies or reviews until the present time because of their direct impact on humans, animals and the environment.