The European Commission is to simplify the Europe-wide system of alerts to food health problems, but has stopped short of proposing to centralise control of the alerts.

Changes to the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) were almost inevitable after an outbreak of E. Coli in May-July 2011 which killed 55 people and made more than 4,000 people sick. The outbreak was at its worst in northern Germany in May, but there was also a significant cluster of cases in June 2011 in south-west France.

The Commission published on Friday (20 July) a review of the food alerts system, taking into account the E. coli outbreak and the lessons learned.

Germany’s health authorities submitted data to the RASFF that misidentified Spanish cucumbers as the source of the outbreak. The Commission was later accused of being too slow to correct this erroneous information. It was only after the disease had spread further that the source was eventually identified as a specific shipment of seeds for bean sprouts from Egypt in 2010.

The Commission administers the RASFF, but it does not independently verify the data submitted by member states during the early stages of a health scare. The data submitted by national authorities is distributed through the network to all other member states. The false alert meant that Spanish vegetable producers suffered heavy losses, as their markets collapsed, which were estimated at €810 million in the first two weeks. The farmers were later partially compensated from the EU budget with €227m.

Moving online

Shortly after the E. coli outbreak, the Commission decided to convert the RASFF system to an all-digital platform. Set up in 1979, most alerts are currently entered and relayed using email. The new iRASFF platform will allow national authorities to enter information online, which should provide more information, faster. Member states will switch over to the new system gradually, though the precise dates have not yet been set.

The Commission is revising rules on traceability so that tracing back the origin of contaminated or suspect foods is faster and more efficient. The Commission is also working with the European Food Safety Authority to improve controls in the cultivation of fruit and vegetables to guard against non-animal pathogens. Specific rules on the production of seeds and sprouts are being developed.

The Commission is to provide specific training for major trading partners such as Egypt on investigating food-borne outbreaks and on managing outbreaks.

Some critics had hoped the Commission would take a more central role in the RASFF. Under existing rules the Commission can assume special powers such as suspending sales of food and setting up a crisis unit for an EU-wide response during emergency situations. But these powers have never been used.

It was an EFSA taskforce that belatedly identified the source of the contamination as coming from Egypt. But this work was not undertaken at an EU level until after the outbreak had already peaked.

There will be tighter co-ordination of RASFF with the EU’s Early Warning and Response System, but a Commission official said that it was best at the early stages of a crisis to leave the responsibilities for gathering and disseminating data to member states. “We will strengthen our operating procedure so there are more certainties for the data entered into the system,” he said. “But the responsibility remains with the national authority, which has to put into the system reliable data.”

“We are not in the field, we don’t have at the beginning of a crisis all the data necessary to launch an alert, or to launch a follow-up,” he added. “So it’s up to those who initiate the alert to make sure that they have enough data to launch a notification on RASFF.”

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