The Future of Personal Security

PROTECT YOUR FOOD

Dinner tonight? A steak with certified â€disease-free†DNA

THE THREAT:
Since 9/11, the threat of terrorists poisoning our food supply has diverted attention from more ordinary risks, like the dual threats of mad-cow disease and the E. coli bacterium. Food-safety scientists are bemoaning this development. E. coli sickens 73,000 Americans yearly, and in the U.K. mad-cow disease has killed 156 people, whose brains degenerated when they ate meat contaminated with the errant proteins that cause the disease.

THE SOLUTION:
To assure consumers that the rib eye they buy comes only from noncontaminated cows, Irish company IdentiGEN has developed TraceBack, the first-ever commercial DNA-fingerprinting technology for meat. The process starts at the farm or slaughterhouse, where cows are tested for pathogens. Once each animal receives a clean bill of health, a worker takes a sample of the cow´s blood, meat or hair, analyzes it for genetic identifiers known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, and stores the information in a central database.

At the supermarket, butchers take another DNA sample and match it to the database. In this way, beef producers can prove that they packaged meat from a 100 percent disease-free cow. And if an errant pathogen is introduced at some point along the line-at a shipping facility riddled with E. coli, for instance-food-safety officials will be able to nail down the source of the outbreak within hours by retracing the journeys of infected animals. â€Each product has its own inherent label. It´s like nature´s bar code,†says Ronan Loftus, IdentiGEN´s director of business development, who created TraceBack as a research fellow at Trinity College in the mid-1990s. â€Once this system is in place, you can pull a package of meat off the shelves and access its entire history.†Consumers pay a barely noticeable premium for the â€disease-free†sticker on their beef-on the order of pennies per pound-but come out ahead in peace of mind.

THE ETA:
After successful trials in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, IdentiGEN opened its first North American offices last July. TraceBack certification stickers should start appearing in U.S. supermarkets within the next five years. -Elizabeth Svoboda