Blue Bell Creameries has been battling a Listeria monocytogenes outbreak for the past five years. The potentially killer bacteria was found in ice cream served at a Kansas hospital and sold by retailers. Reports most recently are blaming plants in Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas.
The outbreak triggered a product recall of all Blue Bell ice cream and affected nearly a dozen people across four states. Health officials used genome sequencing to identify the source of the problem, but not before three people died.
It’s possible that a single swab of DNA could have prevented this crisis or at least mitigated the damage. That’s what I was told by Anthony Zografos, the founder and chief executive officer of SafeTraces (formerly known as DNATrek), a developer of biological barcodes. He pointed to an outbreak of E. coli in 2006, which Dole baby spinach originating from a single farm in California sickened hundreds and left three dead.
“Our technology could have very quickly identified the origin,” he said. “You can very quickly identify where the problem came from and can contain the recall.”
SafeTraces’ biological barcoding technology is a response to growing food fraud and contaminations that costs the food industry tens of billions of dollars per year, including a $70 billion-plus price tag for foodborne sickness in the United States and $15 billion for fraud, according to SafeTraces statistics. The FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act, which is focused on preventing food contamination and is in the process of being finalized, would require food producers to implement food safety plans.
