New Technology Could Quickly Pinpoint Food Contamination Outbreaks

Sandia National Laboratories said a technology known as “stochastic network representation” can be used to quickly and easily pinpoint sources of global fresh food contamination, and reduce the adverse economic impact. Stochastic mapping tracks product flow through the distribution supply chain. It also helps identify the uncertainties in supplier/customer relationships that often persist because of a lack of information. If stochastic mapping were widely used, outbreaks of food contamination – such the recent ones involving salmonella – could be more quickly tracked down and contained. According to Sandia, faster containment would benefit not only consumers but also farmers who can be severely impacted economically when sales are restricted by delays in determining the source of an outbreak.