if you're planning to get your Thanksgiving food shopping done this weekend the recent spike in food recalls may be top of Mind from organic carrots and ground beef to frozen waffles and Costco salmon food born disease outbreaks are affecting a range of foods eoli leria and other contaminants have sickened thousands of people Nationwide and forced a number of recalls this week the Food and Drug Administration is reassuring the public the US food supply is still quote one of the safest in the world and despite all the coverage insist food recalls were not in fact unusually high this year for more on that I'm joined by Dr Don Schaffner a microbiologist and department chair of Food Science at ruter University with three decades of experience working in food safety so Dr Schaffner when you think about the most recent spot of recalls what pathogens are most commonly causing these foodborn illnesses and what if anything do they tell us about you know vulnerabilities in the supply chain and just how difficult it is to keep food safe sure well the the most recent uh organism that's been in the news is pathogenic ecoli it's the one that is causing this carrot outbreak and it's the one that caused the slivered onions outbreak um also leria monocytogenes is important that's the one that uh is linked to bores head liver worst but salmonella is always a problem although it's not in the headline right now so what does it tell us about some of the vulnerabilities uh in the supply chain I mean on one hand you could certainly argue that the guard rails are working um and on the other hand you have folks who are getting sick from eating you know organic baby carrots sure well anytime anybody gets sick it's it's a tragedy and it's unfortunate the good news is that most baby carrots on the market today are safe I had some for dinner uh the night before last and probably have some for dinner tonight um but yes you're right anytime we have a mistake like this anytime a problem like this crops up it does point out the importance of food safety we're still learning more about exactly what caused the the carrot outbreak and we probably won't have the full facts for for months or weeks but when we do um then the industry will need to go to work and figure out okay that's what happened that's what caused the problem let's see what we can do to put in place to stop it from happening again yeah and I mean you know baby carrots aside I mean what does it tell us about the challenges that exist to keep food safe well certainly there are challenges and I would say the challenges for the food industry are getting even harder because the CDC and other public health agencies are getting even better at finding problems thanks to technology like whole genome sequencing those agencies are able to link cases they haven't previously been able to link how does that sort of play into consumer confidence and folks who want to trust that the FDA is doing all it can um to keep the food that we're eating you know healthy and from getting us sick well I think the FDA is doing the best they can with the resources they have uh same with USDA food safety inspection service those would be the people in charge of uh uh the the the meat products that that caused the leria outbreak uh they could always use more resources but um they're like I said they're doing the best that they can with what they have um okay so let me just take it back really quickly uh the testing is done um how long I mean what's the lag time Dr Schaffner between when the agency sort of flags these items for a recall and how quickly they communicate that with consumers because I think that's often on folks Minds yeah unfortunately it takes some time because the way that the the whole genome sequencing technology works is the first thing the agencies get is sequences and then they've got to say okay we've got 10 people in 10 different states they all have the same sequence so we think they ate the same thing or they were exposed to the same thing now they have to go talk to those people and say hey what did you eat last week the week before and then look for a statistical signal that says oh you know what it's the slivered onions on the big The Big Mac or the Quarter Pounders or it's the it's the it's the the carrots that you the baby carrots that you bought at retail and then we got to go even further and trace it back to okay which baby carrots and where did they come from and then do inspections of those facilities and then go back and inspect the Farms where those came from it's a long process it is a long process very quickly it does feel like we've seen a lot of these recalls happen but are we about on Pace for where we would typically be this time of year are we higher lower that's hard to say I think recalls happen um randomly and so we've just had unfortunately the this random occurrence of three recalls I don't think we'll see more um in the next few months but I could be wrong Dr Don Schaffner thanks so much for your time sure of my pleasure