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Food safety in Vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences

Food-borne diseases are attracting a lot of attention in Vietnam as a result of repeated episodes of adulterated and unsafe food. In this paper, we provide some perspectives on food safety in Vietnam from the point of view of an international research institution working on food safety with partners...

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Autores principales: Nguyen-Viet, Hung, Tuyet-Hanh, Tran Thi, Unger, Fred, Dang-Xuan, Sinh, Grace, Delia
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5314466/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28209208
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40249-017-0249-7
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author Nguyen-Viet, Hung
Tuyet-Hanh, Tran Thi
Unger, Fred
Dang-Xuan, Sinh
Grace, Delia
author_facet Nguyen-Viet, Hung
Tuyet-Hanh, Tran Thi
Unger, Fred
Dang-Xuan, Sinh
Grace, Delia
author_sort Nguyen-Viet, Hung
collection PubMed
description Food-borne diseases are attracting a lot of attention in Vietnam as a result of repeated episodes of adulterated and unsafe food. In this paper, we provide some perspectives on food safety in Vietnam from the point of view of an international research institution working on food safety with partners in the country. We argue that one of the key issues of food safety in Vietnam is that certain food value chain stakeholders lack ethics, which leads to the production and trading of unsafe foods in order to make profits irrespective of adverse health effects on consumers. In turn, the shortfall in ethical behaviours around food can be attributed to a lack of incentives or motivating factors. Although food safety causes panic in the population, it is unclear how much contaminated food contributes to the burden of food-borne diseases and food poisonings in Vietnam. However, globally, the biggest health problem associated with food are infections from consuming food contaminated with viruses, bacteria or parasites. A major food safety challenge is the inappropriate way of communicating food risks to the public. Another key constraint is the inherent difficulty in managing food in wet markets and from smallholder production. On the other hand, local foods, and local food production and processing are an important cultural asset as well as being essential to food safety, and these aspects can be put at risk if food safety concerns motivate consumers to purchase more imported foods. In this paper, we also discuss good experiences in food safety management from other countries and draw lessons learnt for Vietnam on how to better deal with the current food safety situation. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40249-017-0249-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-53144662017-02-24 Food safety in Vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences Nguyen-Viet, Hung Tuyet-Hanh, Tran Thi Unger, Fred Dang-Xuan, Sinh Grace, Delia Infect Dis Poverty Commentary Food-borne diseases are attracting a lot of attention in Vietnam as a result of repeated episodes of adulterated and unsafe food. In this paper, we provide some perspectives on food safety in Vietnam from the point of view of an international research institution working on food safety with partners in the country. We argue that one of the key issues of food safety in Vietnam is that certain food value chain stakeholders lack ethics, which leads to the production and trading of unsafe foods in order to make profits irrespective of adverse health effects on consumers. In turn, the shortfall in ethical behaviours around food can be attributed to a lack of incentives or motivating factors. Although food safety causes panic in the population, it is unclear how much contaminated food contributes to the burden of food-borne diseases and food poisonings in Vietnam. However, globally, the biggest health problem associated with food are infections from consuming food contaminated with viruses, bacteria or parasites. A major food safety challenge is the inappropriate way of communicating food risks to the public. Another key constraint is the inherent difficulty in managing food in wet markets and from smallholder production. On the other hand, local foods, and local food production and processing are an important cultural asset as well as being essential to food safety, and these aspects can be put at risk if food safety concerns motivate consumers to purchase more imported foods. In this paper, we also discuss good experiences in food safety management from other countries and draw lessons learnt for Vietnam on how to better deal with the current food safety situation. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40249-017-0249-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2017-02-16 /pmc/articles/PMC5314466/ /pubmed/28209208 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40249-017-0249-7 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Commentary
Nguyen-Viet, Hung
Tuyet-Hanh, Tran Thi
Unger, Fred
Dang-Xuan, Sinh
Grace, Delia
Food safety in Vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences
title Food safety in Vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences
title_full Food safety in Vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences
title_fullStr Food safety in Vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences
title_full_unstemmed Food safety in Vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences
title_short Food safety in Vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences
title_sort food safety in vietnam: where we are at and what we can learn from international experiences
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5314466/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28209208
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40249-017-0249-7
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