A FOOD safety expert has warned that an E coli 0157 epidemic, similar to the Scottish outbreak which resulted in 18 deaths, is "just waiting to happen in Ireland".
Dr Patrick Wall, a consultant epidemiologist at the Communicable Diseases Surveillance Centre in London, said the Scottish outbreak could easily happen here because of the widespread butcher shop practice of keeping raw and cooked meats side by side.
"This is a disaster waiting to happen here. As we know it is serious because it can cause renal failure," Dr Wall told the IMO conference.
Irish-born Dr Wall, who was addressing a session of the conference "The Food We Eat - How Safe is it?", called for the immediate establishment of a national surveillance centre in Ireland.
He said that the recent salmonella scare involving Milupa baby milk was identified in Ireland only because it had been picked up in the United Kingdom. "There were two cases found in Ireland but there were probably a lot more simply not picked up.
Without a surveillance centre they just did not know what was out there. "It is difficult to understand this situation in a country, where food is such a big issue, said Dr Wall.
He said public health doctors in different parts of Ireland may be identifying cases of food poisoning and not realising that they are linked to cases in other parts of the State. "A group of people might have been in the same place in Dublin over the weekend and gone back to different parts of the country and been sick. But a link cannot be made because there is no central communication point."
Referring to BSE, Dr Wall said there was a conflict of interest in the Department of Agriculture being responsible for promoting Irish food and also policing its safety,
He warned that a form of salmonella - typhimurium DT104, which is resistant to seven antibiotics - would soon be a problem in Ireland. Consumers needed to be extra vigilant, said Dr Wall about the food they were purchasing and the country of origin. He also warned of the dangers associated with factory farming arid intensive rearing practices.
"In 1994 there was an outbreak in a number of European countries because of a shigella pathogen in iceberg lettuce. It was exported from Spain where they had been watering it with sewage-contaminated water. We may be able to get cheap chickens now as a result of factory farming but we are also getting chickens that have been given antibiotics to resist disease in these close surroundings and who have ended up with pathogens resistant to antibiotics."