Food safety is a scientific discipline describing the handling, preparation, and storage of food in ways that prevent foodborne illness. This includes a number of routines that should be followed to avoid potentially severe health hazards. Food can transmit disease from person to person as well as serve as a growth medium for bacteria that can cause food poisoning. In developed countries there are intricate standards for food preparation, whereas in lesser developed countries the main issue is simply the availability of adequate safe water, which is usually a critical item.

A summary of recent food safety issues including E. coli contamination of meat, the USDA/FDA press conference on food products from cloned animals and a petition you can sign.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Agriculture Department said fresh ground beef products contaminated with multi-drug resistant Salmonella may have been ground and later sold at Safeway Inc stores in five states. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service...

A defunct Canadian meatpacker is "a likely source" of beef that caused an outbreak of food-borne illnesses in the United States and Canada, the U.S. meat safety agency said on Friday. Nearly 100 illnesses have been reported...

While USDA regulates only 20 percent of the food supply, it gets two-thirds of food-safety budget and has ten times the number of inspectors as FDA. FDA regulates 80 percent of the food supply, and these products cause the lion’s share of food safety problems. “During the last few years, the Secretary of Agriculture has spent far more time trying

The reports earlier this week were all wrong. As explained in the actual legal brief: testing all young normal-looking cattle for slaughter, as proposed by plaintiff, is not practical and offers no animal health or food safety value because testing a young infected animal with the current methodology would likely produce false negative results,