Course Overview

The lecture provides an overview of food safety: historical aspects, biological, chemical, and physical hazards, their risks, toxicological endpoints, safety factors, determination of standards, negligible risks, risk analysis, and so forth. Biological hazards include bacteria, parasites, and viruses. As for bacterial hazards, detection methods such as conventional plating and multiplex PCR as well as injured bacteria will be introduced. The chemical hazards include unintended contaminants such as mycotoxins, marine toxins, and cooked food toxins and intendedly-used chemicals such as food additives and pesticides. Physical hazards will be radio active substances, glass, and metals. In terms of safety measures for biological hazards, pasteurization/sterilization processes (e.g. heat treatment, high pressure treatment, and other novel technologies) will be explained as well as daily practices at home. For promoting fair food trade in the framework of World Trade Organization, Codex Alimentarius Commission plays an important role via establishment of international food safety standards.

Learning Achievement

To acquire knowledge on food safety from the viewpoints of chemical, biological, and physical hazards, toxicology, pasteurization/sterilization, and food safety standards and to understand the general aspects on food safety.

Competence

Expertise, English language proficiency

Course prerequisites

Grading Philosophy

The students will be graded based on the reports submitted after each lecture.

Course schedule

Overview of food safety
Risk and hazard, historical aspects of food safety
Overview of toxicology, toxicological endpoints, safety factor, determination of standards, negligible risk
Chemical hazard 1: overview of natural toxins (unintended contaminants such as mycotoxins, hazardous elements, marine toxins, and cooked food toxins)
Chemical hazard 2: overview of intendedly-used chemicals such as food additives and pesticides; ADI, determination of standards for food additives and pesticides; their actual contents in food
Microbial hazard1: progress in microbiology and prolonged life expectancy; hazardous micororganisms such as bacteria, yeasts, parasites, and viruses
Microbial hazard 2: detection of microbes, injured bacteria, Multiplex PCR
Physical hazard: radio active substances, glass, metal
Pasteurization/sterilization methods such as heat treatment, high pressure treatment, and other novel technologies
Food safety standards; international food safety standards by Codex Alimentarius Commission; World Trade Organization (WTO); SPS agreement; TBT agreement; establishment of international food safety standards

Course type

Lectures

Online Course Requirement

Instructor

Yamamoto Kazutaka

Other information

Site for Inquiry

Link to the syllabus provided by the university