Food and drug safety ministry runs joint food-crisis drill with WHO network

South Korea's food and drug safety ministry said Thursday it ran this year's national disaster-response exercise jointly with the World Health Organization's International Food Safety Authorities Network, rehearsing a response to a mass food-poisoning outbreak traced to imported ingredients.

The drill assumed that processed foods made with imported material contaminated by cereulide toxin had reached shelves nationwide and left large numbers of people ill. Cereulide is a substance secreted by Bacillus cereus, a food-poisoning bacterium with an incubation period of half an hour to six hours that causes severe vomiting, nausea and abdominal pain and is found in foods rich in carbohydrates.

This year's focus was coordination with the WHO food safety network, known as INFOSAN, which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the WHO set up to share information quickly and mount coordinated responses when a food safety emergency or hazardous food emerges. The ministry said the aim was to test the link between domestic handling and international cooperation when a safety incident stems from imported ingredients.

The exercise walked through the response sequence: investigating the cause of the poisoning in both patients and products, tracing how the suspect material was imported and distributed and recalling the goods, assessing the crisis level and running the emergency organisation, issuing hazard information to the public, and checking overseas alerts and exchanging information with affected countries through INFOSAN. Members of the public attended and raised points for improvement, the ministry said.

"In particular, to respond effectively to hazards arising in internationally linked food supply chains, close information exchange and cooperation with international organisations and relevant countries is essential, not just the domestic response," Food and Drug Safety Minister Oh Yu-kyoung said at the exercise site.

An INFOSAN official said the exercise had been a meaningful opportunity to confirm that rapid information exchange and close cooperation between countries are critical to preventing the spread of damage when a food safety incident occurs.

The ministry said it will incorporate the improvements identified in the drill into its crisis-response manual and keep expanding exercises and inter-agency cooperation against a range of food safety incidents. Thursday's drill was held under the annual Safe Korea disaster-response training, which 335 central government bodies, local governments and public institutions take part in each year.