Food and water safety (FWS)

Funding period: 2011–2016

Participating departments and agencies: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Environment Canada, Health Canada, National Research Council of Canada, Public Health Agency of Canada

Lead: Sabah Bidawid, Health Canada

Total GRDI funding: $7,567,727

The food and water safety project involved 53 scientists and their teams from 6 departments and agencies and 148 collaborators. It addressed risks from foodborne and waterborne bacteria, estimated to cost Canada more than $12 billion annually. The teams developed an integrated federal system to manage massive amounts of genomic data and developed technology to reduce detection–isolation turnaround times for some pathogens of concern from five days to less than eight hours. This will significantly increase Canada's ability to respond to pathogen outbreaks in Canada's food production and water systems.

Highlights

• Five-year collaboration
• Fifty-three scientists and their teams
• Six federal departments and agencies

Key achievements

• The most comprehensive cataloguing to date of Canadian food and water pathogen genomes
• An analytical platform deployed across Canada to public health authorities for rapid identification of priority pathogens
• New technologies that reduced detection and isolation times from days to hours with near-perfect accuracy

Benefits

• Much faster and effective response to incidents of food or water contamination (E. coli, Salmonella)
• Reduced risks from foodborne and waterborne illness estimated to cost Canada more than $12 billion per year