David W.K. Acheson, M.D., appointed in 2007 to the newly established position of Assistant FDA Commissioner for Food Protection by Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D., has had a busy year. In addition to his 30,000-ft. oversight duties related to the release of the national Food Protection and Import Safety plans, Acheson also served for a month-and-a-half as Acting Director of FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) during the search to replace previous CFSAN Director Robert Brackett, Ph.D. In January, Director of FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine Stephen F. Sundlof, D.V.M., Ph.D., was named the new CFSAN Director. In January, von Eschenbach expanded Dr. Acheson's role by naming him Associate Commissioner of Foods, giving him an agency-wide leadership role for all food and feed issues, including health promotion and nutrition.
Acheson has also served as CFSAN’s Chief Medical Officer and Director of the Office of Food Defense, Communication and Emergency Response at CFSAN, where he played key roles in managing significant food safety issues and emergencies. He is a graduate of the University of London Medical School, with training in internal medicine and infectious diseases. He has published extensively and is internationally recognized both for his public health expertise in food safety and his research in infectious diseases. Acheson is a fellow of both the Royal College of Physicians (London) and the Infectious Disease Society of America. He was a member of the National Advisory Committee for Microbiological Criteria for Foods from 1998 to 2007 and has served on World Health Organization working groups, as well as National Institutes of Health advisory committees. He has also held academic posts at the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore, MD, where he focused on research of foodborne pathogens, and at Tufts University in Boston, MA, where he researched basic molecular pathogenesis of foodborne pathogens.
Acheson spent some time recently with Food Safety Magazine to share his thoughts on the recently unveiled Food Protection Plan, Import Safety Plan and other upcoming agency initiatives in progress to further increase the safety of the U.S. food supply.
Food Safety Magazine:As Assistant FDA Commissioner for Food Protection, and recently, as the appointed Acting Director of CFSAN, your oversight responsibilities have been quite extended, Dr. Acheson. What are your professional objectives and goals for CFSAN in 2008?
Dr. David Acheson: In the position of Assistant FDA Commissioner for Foods, my role is to coordinate food and feed issues across the agency. One of my main responsibilities is to oversee the implementation of the Food Protection Plan, which includes a variety of areas broader than those that fall under CFSAN’s oversight. So my goals involving this high level coordination and leadership in the agency on food and feed haven’t changed.
Food Safety Magazine:With the release of FDA’s Food Protection Plan in November 2007, the U.S. now has a comprehensive blueprint to address both unintentional and deliberate contamination of the nation’s food supply. Would you give us a brief overview of the plan and describe its key elements?
Acheson: The plan was written at request of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and Commissioner von Eschenbach, who, in May, laid out the need for a national blueprint. The resulting Food Protection Plan encompasses both food and feed, addresses both domestic and imported products, and deals with both food safety and food defense.
The plan has three core elements. The first is prevention, which is all about building in food safety upfront to prevent problems in the first place, whether involving domestic or foreign product. The second element is intervention, which involves targeted inspection and testing. The third element is response, which gets at improving speed of response and as part of response, improving communication with all stakeholders, including consumers.
These three core elements—prevention, intervention and response—are concepts that the agency has always implemented but there is a much greater emphasis on prevention in the Food Protection Plan. We’re trying to shift our focus from reacting to food safety problems when they occur to preventing them from occurring in the first place. The whole program is driven on the basis of risk—risk-based preventive strategies, risk based interventions and risk-based inspections are key to its success. We already have a risk-based food protection system established, so the Food Protection Plan has been developed to extend that system. This extension will require data input using our own data sources as well as acquiring data from others, and establishing research and scientific data needs to inform the risk management process. It will also require the use of modern technology; not just information technology but advanced detection and process control technologies.
Food Safety Magazine:You’ve indicated that the Food Protection Plan’s three core elements—prevention, intervention, and response—focus on identifying the level of risk over a product’s life cycle and targeting resources to achieve greatest risk reduction. How will this emphasis on risk management benefit supply chain stakeholders?