Transcript Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition: Program and

The Power of New Information in
Risk-Based Decision Making
Don L. Zink, Ph.D.
Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
College, Park, MD
Some Observations on New
Information
• “True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of
uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.” –
Winston Churchill
• “Information is not knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
• “I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth
doing was to add to the sum of accurate information
in the world.” – Margaret Mead
• Information is new when you find it or figure out how
to use it – even if its been right under your nose all
along.
Using Old Information in New Ways
• Castleberry botulism
Outbreak
– The first low acid canned
food botulism outbreak
due to commercially
canned foods in more
than 30 years
– Caused by under-processing on a retort system that is
technically sophisticated
– The outbreak led FDA to find new ways to use some old
databases to identify potentially problem canners
Crateless Retort*
* Graphic image from http://www.maloinc.com/photo-retort.htm
Crateless Retort*
* Graphic image from http://www.maloinc.com/crateless-process.htm
Awash in Information!
• The case of “whole genome
sequencing” (WGS)
– We can now sequence the
bacterial genome quickly and
cheaply
– Each sequence amounts to 4 – 5 million base pairs
– The sequence is the key to all the bacterium can do:
its virulence, antibiotic resistance, serotype, phage
type and even its family tree
Using Genomics Information
• Will WGS ultimately replace strain identification
technologies such as serotyping and even PFGE?
• Can we use WGS to augment epidemiological
investigations?
• Can use WGS to tell us where bacterial strains
originate?
• Can we use WGS data to design molecular probes
that will let us more rapidly detect specific
pathogens?
Summary
• Our world is changing
faster than ever before
and large databases and
powerful software
analytical tools will drive
this change.
• We need to spend more
time discussing how we
can share and use data
• We cannot let technological capability get far
ahead of ability to analyze the data