Concerns About Virus on Food Imports
Are Real, Expert Says
Bloomberg News
October 29, 2020, 12:47 AM GMT Updated on October 29, 2020,
2:14 AM GMT
There is a real risk of cross-border coronavirus
transmission through the $1.5 trillion global agri-food market, according to a
scientist who has studied the phenomenon.
It is possible that contaminated food imports can
transfer the virus to workers as well as the environment, said Dale Fisher,
an infectious diseases physician at Singapore’s National University Hospital.
Frozen-food markets are thought to be one harbor in the first part of a chain
of transmission, he added.
“It’s hitching a ride on the food, infecting the first
person that opens the box,” Fisher, who also chairs the Global Outbreak Alert
and Response Network, said in an interview. “It’s not to be confused with
supermarket shelves getting infected. It’s really at the marketplace, before
there’s been a lot of dilution.”
In recent months China has been vocal about finding traces
of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen on packaging and food, raising fears that imported
items are linked to recent virus resurgences. Beijing has ordered a range of
precautionary steps, creating major disruptions with its trading partners.
While such transmission remains a “freakish” event, the
scale of the global food trade is such that it will occur a few times out of
millions of imports and exports, said Fisher.
‘Two Schools’
It’s a theory that has been downplayed by the World Health
Organization and some western nations. The WHO has said recent evidence of
epidemiology shows that it’s “unlikely” that the virus could be transmitted
from the surfaces to human respiratory systems, while the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration has also stated it isn’t aware of any evidence to suggest the
disease can spread through food.
Outside China, where authorities are increasingly weighing
in the possibility that the virus can be carried and transmitted via food
packaging, the theory is barely mentioned or discussed. Fisher is one of the
few international experts who studies the seeding of outbreaks in contaminated
fresh and frozen food.
“There’s two schools of thought and the minority view
which I adhere to is that there’s a
lot of circumstantial evidence,” Fisher said. “A lot of people may be
against this because they don’t want to scare the world -- the food could be a
source.”
Experiments done by Fisher’s team show the coronavirus could
survive in the time and temperatures associated with transportation and storage
conditions used in the international food trade. The study published in August
showed no weakening of the infectious virus after 21 days at standard food
refrigeration and freezing temperatures when the pathogen was added to samples
of chicken, salmon and pork.
The fact that the virus tends to thrive in cold and dry environments has made
cold-storage facilities ideal spaces for the pathogen to spread. Meatpacking
plants and abattoirs, instead of schools and churches, are more likely to be
hot spots for Covid-19 outbreaks, according to Fisher.
“It’s because there’s a lot of stainless steel, which it grows on,” he said. “It’s cold, it’s
crowded -- it’s noisy so the people have to yell.”
China Scares
Earlier this month, authorities in the eastern Chinese
coastal city of Qingdao said they found live SARS-CoV-2 on imported frozen
seafood, with two port workers responsible for unloading the refrigerated
packaging testing positive for the virus.
China has said several times in recent months that imported
refrigerated goods are risks for re-introducing the coronavirus into the
country. It subsequently banned imported products, including seafood from
Indonesia and chicken wings from Brazil, following positive tests on shipping
containers and food packaging.
A June outbreak in Beijing
triggered a nationwide boycott of salmon when the virus was traced to the chopping
board of a seller of imported fish. New Zealand, which has maintained long
virus-free stretches, also said it was looking at the chance that one of its
new clusters could be linked to a cold-storage plant.
Fisher argued the reason Asian countries are more likely to
find evidence of food and packaging transmission is thanks to the now contained
nature of outbreaks in many of those countries, unlike those in the west now
battling a second wave of infections.
“You’d never pick it up in the U.S. or in Europe, because
you only pick it up if you go from zero cases for 100 days, and then have a
small cluster,” he said. “You say, well how did this small cluster start?”
To prevent this,
food production companies need to ensure workers are vigilant on
mask-wearing, hand-washing and regular sanitization of surfaces and utensils.
“And you need to make sure that all these outbreaks in meat
processing plants stop,” he said.
— With assistance by Philip Heijmans, and Claire Che
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