- On June 2-4, 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) hosted a series of webinars celebrating World Food Safety Day 2025. Leading voices from WHO and other institutions discussed the role of science in food safety progression as part of the theme of this year’s campaign, “Food Safety: Science in Action.”
- During a webinar that discussed the role of science in protecting public health, panelists emphasized the need to create systems that can “credibly” and “rapidly” turn scientific evidence into meaningful impact. For example, Dr. Moez Sanaa from the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at WHO said that “the next step is action, creating rules and systems that are flexible enough to handle new things like lab-grown meat or new ways of testing food safety without animals.”
- Panelists also discussed the importance of science and data in informing our understanding of food safety hazards. Dr. Pamela Byrne, the vice chair of the EFSA Management Board and the former Food Safety Authority of Ireland CEO, emphasized the need to revise existing regulatory frameworks to meet evolving food safety risks. As a next step, she said that institutions should utilize more “food consumption data, monitoring, and surveillance to understand how people are exposed to different food safety hazards.” Specifically, she said that we should consider whether what we know about risk allows our regulatory frameworks to be “fit for purpose for the future.”
- Further, panelists said that in assessing risk, it is important to consider the impact on the population where a hazard is occurring. For example, in Mediterranean countries, the population understands hazards related to sun exposure in the middle of the day, whereas in countries like Poland, the population is more aware of hazards related to poisonous mushrooms in the forest that do not become a risk until added to a plate. To address uncertainty, according to the panelists, we must “creat[e] a framework that is predictable, that has some level of flexibility, but is anchored with risk analysis principles.”
- The WHO Alliance for Food Safety also emphasized its continued commitment to advance the role of science in developing food safety measures. Specifically, the Alliance aims to integrate “foodborne diseases into national surveillance systems, foster collaboration and capacity across laboratories, and improve data sharing and awareness.”
