 Every individual involved in the food industry, from farm to table, is concerned with food safety. And the primary thrust of this concern is directed towards preventing the unintentional contamination of that food. But what if some individuals or group desires to intentionally contaminate food for political or other reasons? Are we prepared to recognize and prevent such an act? Such an act has happened several times in the past, and it's likely to occur again in the future. Unfortunately, one of the most notorious cases occurred in the United States in 1984. It happened in the Dalles, Oregon, a small town located along the Columbia River. Members of a commune and followers of an Indian cult leader, the Bhagwan Rashnish, purposely contaminated salad bars at 10 local restaurants with salmonella on a Sunday in September. The result was 751 confirmed cases of salmonella poisoning. Additionally, before it was over, four of the contaminated restaurants went out of business, putting many employees out of work, and three of the owners were forced into personal bankruptcy. Ironically, investigators from the Center for Disease Control in the Oregon State Department of Health determined the incidents were accidental and caused by poor hygiene on the part of the restaurant workers at the 10 separate locations. The investigators simply could not believe the incident had been purposely caused, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The true nature of the incident was not revealed until a year later when the Bhagwan himself reported the perpetrators to the Oregon police. It is doubtful whether the CDC or any other investigators today would be as reluctant to consider such an incident as to be a biostarist attack, especially now considering 9-11 and the subsequent anthrax incidents. The possibility of intentional contamination of our food supply remains a threat that must be taken seriously. It's a threat that once recognized can be defended against with good planning, common sense, and appropriate vigilance. The following segments will help you prepare a defensive plan for your organization that can be employed successfully to meet this challenge. The steps are simple. Assess your current situation, prepare your plan, test it by conducting periodic exercises, and modify it as required. The United States has one of the safest food supplies in the world, but the threat of terrorism has changed the face of many industries, including food service. Attacks on the World Trade Center and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City have made us reevaluate our safety. The United States has also become increasingly aware that the use of anthrax or any other threatening agent on even a small scale can overcome our emergency response system, and a deliberate act to contaminate the food supply could have catastrophic effects. Terrorism is defined as a use of force or violence against persons or property in violation of criminal laws for the purpose of intimidation, coercion, or ransom. Protecting against these acts isn't just the responsibility of authorities. Everyone involved from the farm to the table must play a role. Protection against both intentional and unintentional contamination is important in the food service study. There are several types of intentional threats, including chemical, biological, and nuclear. Let's start with chemical. A chemical threat is the use of chemical agents to kill or incapacitate people, destroy livestock, and ravage crops. Often chemical agents are difficult to detect in the food we eat. Examples of chemical agents can include toxic organic compounds, industrial chemicals, pesticides, heavy metal containing compounds, and microbial or plant toxins. Chemical threats are usually spread by inhalation, ingestion, or exposure by skin or eye contact. The next type of threat is biological. Biological agents are living infectious microbes or toxins produced by microorganisms. They can be dispersed as liquid, solid, or aerosol. Biological agents are the biggest concern in the food industry. When looking into contamination by biological agents, public health agencies look for clusters of illness and disease outbreaks because biological contamination can spread rapidly. Unlike chemical contamination, which is often localized, biological threats can be widespread because they could affect others who weren't initially exposed. Biologic agents are highly contagious, and it's difficult for authorities to identify whether the outbreak is an intentional or unintentional event. Symptoms look much the same as foodborne disease and can include headache, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle weakness, and seizures. That's why it's important to report illness in your establishment because it may be the sign of a larger contamination. The third type of threat is nuclear. The threat of a nuclear attack on our food supply is slim. However, a nuclear attack in the United States could affect all aspects of life. The government is actively looking into ways to protect against a nuclear attack through intelligence and early detection. A restaurant can be at risk for many types of contamination. That's why it's important to have a plan of action. This plan will prepare all employees to deal with a potential threat or deliver contamination. It is very worthwhile. That's what the goal of preventing the stuff happening is, is to assess your risk and find the weak spots. Depending on the size of your business, assessing the risk can be a time-consuming process, but it is worthwhile. Only management and emergency personnel should be involved in the assessment process so that unauthorized persons aren't aware of potential weak spots. One of the first things to consider during assessment are emergency contacts. Businesses should be familiar with the emergency response system in their community. That way, if an emergency does occur, management and employees will know immediately who to contact. 24-hour contact should be listed and staff should be trained on how to use them. All employees should know who to contact on the management team for the establishment. And then there should also be 24-hour contacts for all local, state, federal police, fire, any rescue operations in the area, the health department, and so on. The next step in assessment is identifying the areas that are not in the public eye. These will vary depending on the size of the facility, but can include loading docks, storerooms, bathrooms, and employee entrances or exits. Anything that is not in a public area or is poorly lit is considered a risk. Management should check these places carefully and document any potentially vulnerable spots. Loading areas are especially important to assess. Loading docks are generally out of the public eye. They are not in a secure location. Some facilities may have fenced in areas that help prevent unauthorized access to those facilities. Another area that should be looked at is the establishment's water supply. If you're on a private well, make sure your well house is locked and your water lines are as secure as possible. First find out if you're on a community or a municipal system or a private well. All municipal systems double check. Go over that with them. Find out what their safety procedures are to see if their facility is secure. If you're on a private well, make sure and secure all water connections. Make sure backflow prevention is installed properly and at your establishment. When assessing risks, it's also important to pay attention to your management practices. Have staff been trained on what to look for when accepting shipments? Do you know the character of the person working in the areas you've identified as high risk? Are there security controls for outside contractors such as pest control and cleaning crews? And have employees been trained to be your extra set of eyes and ears? Employees can be a great resource in watching for suspicious activity. When you have people in a large-scale facility where you might not be able to view everything, have employees work in pairs that you know so there's less chance of a single person committing some kind of act. Answering these simple questions about your management practices will help you to identify more areas that could be vulnerable to intentional contamination. Now that you've assessed your business's potential risks, it's time to formulate a plan for emergencies. The main goal of food protection plans should not only be prevention. It should be more of a three-prong approach where it would include not only prevention strategies, but it also would include response plans and recovery plans for a business that's paramount that they have the means to recover after an event. You'll want to have a planning session to go over your risk and response. This is when management invites more employees to be included. In a small operation, the management, chefs and servers would be involved in this meeting. The larger your operation, the more people that should be involved in planning. You're going to have the CEO, possibly the COO or operations, people who are in charge of operations. You'll want to have obviously the quality assurance, food safety professionals, your security officers, finance and IT, transportation officials, so it could be, depending on the size of your company, a very large team. The National Restaurant Association recommends using a six-step approach of threat evaluation, assessment and management or team approach. You may have done some assessment and planning already, which fits perfectly with the first step to identify the potential threats in all phases of the operation. Potential threats might exist at any step in the flow of food from purchasing to serving. The second step is to assess the threats and determine which have the highest risk level or which could have the greatest negative impact. And then you assess whether it's a likelihood of an event or what the impact, so you're going to thoroughly assess what impact that would have on your operation. For each threat, you can assign a severity and probability rating. The severity rating will assess how much damage could result, and the probability rating assesses how likely the act is to occur. This will help you to determine which may be the greatest threat to your operation. The third step is to analyze threat control measures and establish management controls or procedures to eliminate potential threats and or reduce their risk levels. Threat control measures can include adding security devices such as key cards to limit access, installing warning devices such as alarms on doors, and developing procedures and training staff in case there is an emergency. Or for smaller operations, consider your risk and take appropriate action. Step four includes implementing control measures and establishing management monitoring of each critical exposure point. The management is responsible for ensuring that staff, vendors, and contractors follow all protocol, including showing credentials. Managers are responsible for monitoring potentially vulnerable spots in the establishment from deliveries through service. When working on this step, you may want to consider these management questions. How do you monitor? Who will monitor and how often? And how are vulnerabilities recorded? Step five, take corrective actions when there is a break in management control at the critical exposure point. Corrective actions should eliminate any potential exposure due to the loss of management control such as in a natural disaster. If management is not available, companies should have a crisis communication team and a plan in place and keep a record of corrective actions taken. The final step is to verify and review to make sure that team is working. All food defense plans must be tested regularly to ensure that all staff members are following protocol. That's where it's important to have human resources involved in regards to developing any kind of program for food security because they have that one-on-one interaction with your employees and they have programs in place that identify at-risk employees, disgruntled employees. If issues are found while testing the plan, an action plan should be updated to resolve issues. This is part of a continuous improvement process. A food defense plan is not complete until everyone is trained and the plan is tested. It's important to implement the plan before an actual incident happens because when you're operating in crisis mode, it's too late to find out if your plan works. Actually, the preparation for any type of event will prepare you for whatever may come your way. If you've done nothing, you're going to be in trouble. There are two ways to test and train to the plan. First, you can train managers and employees by communicating the plan to them. When doing this, it's a good idea for the manager to designate a member of the team to act as a security manager. Security is often an additional job responsibility depending on the size of the facility. This person is a key contact for all security measures in the facility and will report to the manager. They will also be in charge if an emergency does happen. Security managers know employees well. They watch for suspicious behavior in the facility, they monitor deliveries, they make sure everyone is fully trained on the defense plan. I think it's very important that the security manager be the one that assembles all the employees from time to time and go over things with them. You can do it once a year, but if you don't do it on a recurring basis, everybody kind of forgets what they should be doing. There are a number of training styles and tools that can be used. Managers and employees can be trained to the plan by using short training periods or extended classroom trainings. Handouts, wallet-sized information cards, or other training aids can help staff to familiarize themselves with procedures. Training can be done by using role-playing or by interviewing employees and asking them questions. Short role-playing may involve as few or as many players as needed for the situation. For example, create a scenario such as a delivery arriving at an unscheduled time. What steps should your staff take to ensure that contaminated materials don't make it into your facility? If you choose to use interview questions when training, the questions should deal with more specific actions such as the who, what, where, and how to be prepared. Why is it important to inspect your shipment? Make sure nothing's been tampered with or contaminated. Managers can demonstrate the location of needed materials and how to contact emergency and security personnel. Keeping in touch with and knowing your local emergency contacts, networking with your Chamber of Commerce, and having your plan reviewed by your state or local homeland security or Department of Health are also good ways for management to keep the plan fresh and to make sure that proper procedures are being followed. These contacts will also help you to keep abreast of community, county, or state emergency tests you can participate in. This will test how your plan coordinates with larger security plans in your area. The last step in testing the plan is examining what worked and what didn't. Change and update your plan and then test it again in the near future. This will help your plan to remain effective in protecting your staff and customers as well as your business. We are all responsible for protecting our food supply and each one of us can play an important role by making sure that there is a food defense plan in place. Training staff on the plan and adjusting the plan is necessary. This advanced preparation can enable your facility to prepare, respond, and recover if there's a potential threat. We all can make a difference and a food defense plan is the first step. Now that you've heard stories of intentional contamination, how to formulate a plan to protect against it, and how to test that plan, you're probably wondering should we panic? The short answer is no, but we should recognize bioterrorism as a threat. Take that threat seriously, but also keep it in perspective. It should not be the dominant issue in any food service operation. That's not to say that we shouldn't plan for a possible intentional contamination. A simple, well-designed plan will be the best defense. Complicated plans will be impossible to implement, and oftentimes they'll be ignored. Make sure to test your plan and modify it as necessary. Encourage all your workers to become involved in both the planning and the testing processes. The bottom line, the best defense is awareness by all, so have a good plan and implement it.