Food Safety in New Zealand Case Study 2022

Running Head: FOOD SAFETY 1
Food Safety in New Zealand
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FOOD SAFETY 2
Introduction
Food safety incorporates all the practices undertaken to keep the food consumed safe.
Intake of unsafe foods is a global health concern that is endangering everyone, but young
children, elderly, infants, pregnant women, and those with underlying illness seems to be more
vulnerable. Food should be handled in such a way that during storing, preparing, and handling is
dealt with a lot of care to minimise the chances of people becoming sick of foodborne illnesses.
Enhancing Food safety is a significant concern in New Zealand (NZ0 since there has been a rise
in the cases of foodborne illnesses. They include listeriosis, STEC, yersiniosis, norovirus,
salmonellosis, and campylobacteriosis. Also, over 500 people in New Zealand experience food
poisoning in a day. The presence of potential hazards is making it hard for ensuring the
attainment of assurance of food safety. Sources of risks include physical contaminants,
infectious agents, and the presence of potentially toxic chemicals (Kotsanopoulos &
Arvanitoyannis, 2017). This article aims to critically analyse the driving forces as per the WHO
DPSEEA framework, pressures, state changes, exposures, and effects of inadequate food safety
and also discuss the efforts undertaken to tackle the issue and discuss the suggestion in
addressing the issue of food safety.
Part 1
Foodborne pathogens usually incorporate parasites, viruses, and bacteria. The issue of
inadequate food safety poses a significant health problem for the people of NZ. There exist
several factors that are resulting in the consumption of unsafe food. Addressing the issue of food
safety is difficult because of naturally occurring chemical and microbial potential hazards in food
and also the increase in the production of processed foods that have an increased chance of
physical contamination (Elkhishin, Gooneratne & Hussain, 2017). However, with appropriate

FOOD SAFETY 3
interventions during distribution and manufacture, most of the hazards linked to food safety, for
instance, physical hazards may be eliminated or prevented. The consumption of unsafe foods
has increased microbial food safety issues. They include campylobacteriosis with NZ recording
more cases as compared to Australia and the United States (30 times higher than the United
States and three times higher than Australia). The estimated economic cost of campylobacteriosis
is $36 million. The high expenditure puts pressure on the government of New Zealand (Jeffs,
Williman, Martin, Brunton & Walls, 2019). Other effects include causing listeriosis, rising cases
of broken teeth, cuts to the tongue and mouth, choking, damaging the gastrointestinal system.
The driving forces for lack of food safety include;
Chemicals from food are the highest food safety concern facing New Zealand.
Chemicals that originate from plants themselves like tutin in New Zealand honey seems to be a
significant concern in causing food contamination. These chemicals affect the health of people
after consumption. For instance, tutin is highly toxic, and when consumed it affects the nervous
system of the human body. Even as little as one teaspoon of tutin is a high risk to the health of a
person. Since the records started in NZ in 1889, many people have been hospitalised, died, or
incapacitated after the consumption of tutin in honey. The tutin honey outbreak that happened in
the Coromandel Peninsula in NZ in March 2008 affected 22 people. These chemicals are hard to
eliminate since they originate naturally from the plants (Beasley, Hood, Anderson, Reeve &
Slaughter, 2018).
An increase in population is another factor that influences food safety in NZ. The
increase in population requires more food to be produced. The rising population of NZ requires
that food production should double. The agri-food requires to overcome specific challenges in
order to increase their production: these incorporate soil degradation, groundwater depletion, loss