The Power of New Information in Risk-Based Decision Making
Don L. Zink, Ph.D.
Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
College, Park, MD
Some Observations on New Information
• “True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.” – Winston Churchill
• “Information is not knowledge.” – Albert Einstein• “I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth
doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.” – Margaret Mead
• Information is new when you find it or figure out how to use it – even if its been right under your nose all along.
Using Old Information in New Ways
• Castleberry botulism Outbreak– The first low acid canned
food botulism outbreak due to commercially canned foods in more than 30 years
– Caused by under-processing on a retort system that is technically sophisticated
– The outbreak led FDA to find new ways to use some old databases to identify potentially problem canners
Awash in Information!
• The case of “whole genome sequencing” (WGS)– We can now sequence the
bacterial genome quickly and cheaply
– Each sequence amounts to 4 – 5 million base pairs– The sequence is the key to all the bacterium can do:
its virulence, antibiotic resistance, serotype, phage type and even its family tree
Using Genomics Information
• Will WGS ultimately replace strain identification technologies such as serotyping and even PFGE?
• Can we use WGS to augment epidemiological investigations?
• Can use WGS to tell us where bacterial strains originate?
• Can we use WGS data to design molecular probes that will let us more rapidly detect specific pathogens?