Professor Hugh Pennington, one of the worlds leading experts in E.coli, BSE and other infectious diseases recently addressed a scientific meeting of the Faculty of Occupational Medicine in October. Central to his presentation was a prediction that future outbreaks of E.coli are inevitable if international standards are not more rigorously applied.

Professor Pennington who chaired the 1996 Scottish enquiry into the UK's worst ever E.coli outbreak in which 17 people died, addressed the meeting on the very topical issue of infectious disease. In an interestingly titled presentation 'Food Safety, NASA, Chocolate and Others Things' Professor Pennington outlined the possible sources of contamination from both food and the environment and questioned the gap between international best practices and the reality applied in our supermarkets and butcher shops.

Speaking at the meeting Professor Pennington author of the popular science book on public food safety 'When Food Kills', said: "If we are to avoid future outbreaks we have to get standards into practice. The cause behind many of these outbreaks is the failure to take accepted guidelines and put them into practice. The HACCP system developed by NASA to avoid astronauts contracting stomach infections while in space has become the recognised standard for controlling hazards that pose a danger to the preparation of safe food. We need to ensure the guidelines adopted by food suppliers are not just works of fiction, but are instead rigorously implemented."

The meeting forms part of the work undertaken by the Faculty of Occupational Medicine, RCPI, with a view to assisting members of the faculty who are seeking to control and treat infectious diseases in commercial and hospital environments. Dr. Ken Addley Dean of the Faculty will also welcomed Dr. Raymond Johnston addressing the meeting on ‘Infectious Diseases in Civil Aviation’, Professor Hilary Humphries speaking on MRSA and Prof. Kingston Mills who spoke on ‘Vaccines and the Role of Immunology’.