In the first part of this survey (“Foodborne Parasites: An Insidious Threat to Food Safety and Public Health”), we looked in depth at common pathogenic parasites behind foodborne illness outbreaks and assessed the extensive geography of their origin and prevalence. In this concluding part, we look in detail at industry and regulators’ approaches to preventive control and eradication in response to this expansive threat to the global food supply system and its consumers.
Many researchers, food safety scientists, and others have referred to foodborne parasites as an invisible threat. Our research suggests that the only reason they are invisible is our refusal to see them. It is an irrefutable truth that medically important foodborne parasites are a serious threat to public health. It has been estimated that humans harbor some 300 species of parasitic worms and some 70 or more species of protozoa.1 Not all parasites are foodborne. It is also good fortune for public health that many of the medically important parasites—those that infect and cause disease in humans or animals—are rare in the natural world. Since food safety science commonly relegates parasitology to the status of a subspecialty of microbiology, the medically important parasites are sometimes considered only in the context of tropical medicine, despite abundant evidence confirming their prevalence in the food supply, far beyond the tropics.