Officials seek source of food poisoning
Every family has its own name for it: the runs, the trots, bubble guts, work belly… you get the idea. But beyond a few days of keeping close to a bathroom, few sufferers ever bother to find out exactly what hit them. This week in Belize City, however, the good people who safeguard our food supply were trying to find out.
Jacqueline Woods, Reporting
Can you remember when was the last time you ate food and it made you sick? Food poisoning is not uncommon, but there is hardly any data available on how often it occurs and what causes the illness. That information is vital to control food-borne diseases.
Dr. Michael DeShield, Director, Food Safety Dept.
“People would get upset and nobody would do further investigation or something like that, so what we are trying to put into place with the Ministry of Health is a protocol that what you can do so we can find out what food in implicated in the first instance and what kind of pathogen is involved. The Ministry of Health has always been doing some testing on the clinical side, but there has never been the follow up on the food side, what’s actually causing it.”
This week a group of inspection officers, veterinary doctors and lab technicians received training on how to investigate suspected cases of food-borne diseases. The workshop was organised by The Belize Agricultural Health Authority, the organisation that has the lab equipment and test capabilities to tackle any outbreak. Director of the Food Safety Department, Dr. Michael DeShield, says the meeting also addressed another important factor…that is getting BAHA and the Ministry of Health working together.
Dr. Michael DeShield
“There is a lot of overlapped with what BAHA does and what the Ministry of Health does, so we’ll clearly define the role of who is responsible for what. Resources are limited, we want to make sure that it is most efficiently used in the different areas.”
The fieldwork is just as important as the lab studies. There are a total of twenty-one health inspectors that visit all kinds of establishments to promote food safety. .
Godswell Flores, Principal, Public Health Inspector
“Inspection of food establishments should be carried out once every quarter. However, if there are complaints or upon first inspection, the public health inspector finds some conditions that warrants a visit even before the end of the first quarter, then he goes back as often as is necessary.”
Any food establishment found to be negligent may be closed until the matter is resolved.
