The food safety sector needs foresight just like any other. Hence a 2008 conference organised jointly by the Dutch food safety authority and EFSA with the self-explanatory title of 'Future Challenges to Microbial Food Safety'. I mention this because a paper originally presented at that very conference has just been published in the International Journal of Food Microbiology. Called 'Trends in technology, trade and consumption likely to impact on microbial food safety', the report was put together mainly by authors from the UK Food Standards Agency and food manufacturing giant, Unilever. It sets out a detailed "system-based" analysis of various driving factors, political, social, technological, economic etc., and the possible impact they might have on the overall burden of foodborne disease in the coming decades. An ambitious task carried out with an impressively analytical approach and based on a lot of sound data.

So what did this sophisticated reading of the runes reveal? Well nothing all that surprising - it would be a little disturbing if it were otherwise. Essentially, the conclusion is that the demand for food will grow and more of it will be transported all over the world in complicated and hard to trace global supply chains. Furthermore, more meat and poultry will be eaten and more people will be demanding complex convenience foods. These factors will probably act to push up rates of foodborne illness, while more effective regulation, better pathogen detection and improved food safety technology will exert pressure in the opposite direction. It's hard to argue with any of that, although I wonder if the effect of climate change might be underestimated.

It is essential to look to the future and plan for it, especially if prediction is based on extrapolating facts rather than superstition, but it wouldn't be wise to pay too much attention to prophecy, whatever its basis. The one thing about the future that is predictable is that the unforeseen will surely happen and we will need to remain flexible enough to react to it.

Sadly, it seems that these measures have not had the desired effect everywhere. Imported eggs from Spain have been identified as the cause of S. Enteritidis outbreaks linked to catering businesses in the UK on several occasions in recent years and this week has seen the publication of a report from the Health Protection Agency on yet another. It seems that a single Spanish egg production facility may have been responsible for at least 500 cases of illness among the patrons of various Chinese restaurants and other catering operations in the UK last autumn. Fortunately, these imported eggs are not generally sold direct to consumers, but are used mainly in the foodservice and catering sectors, otherwise the outbreak might have been larger still. Nevertheless 500 cases of food poisoning from a single egg producer is some going, and that is just the cases that were notified, there are certain to be many more going unreported.

The knowledge and the tools needed to eradicate Salmonella Enteritidis are available to all egg producers in the EU and have been for ten years. The controls have proven effective and there can be little excuse for not implementing them in a modern egg production plant. It might appear cheaper not to bother in the short term, but eventually there will be a price to pay. It looks like one Spanish egg producer has just been presented with the bill.

Although the Australian researchers Warren and Marshall proved that H. pylori was a cause of human gastric infections more than 20 years ago, how infection is transmitted has been something of a mystery, as has the environmental reservoir for the pathogen. The fact that it cannot easily be isolated from environmental samples has led to the assumption that transmission must be mainly person-to-person. But the new research found strong evidence that H. pylori can exist in a viable non-culturable, or VBNC, state for up to six days when present on spinach leaves and could still be infective. In other words, it is possible that H. pylori is in fact a foodborne pathogen and might conceivably be present - going undetected - on fresh produce and other foods. The most likely vehicle would be human faeces, with contamination occurring mostly via water in much the same way that pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 get onto vegetables in the field.

This is of course pure speculation at present, and these tentative findings need to be confirmed and investigated further, but it would help to explain why two thirds of the world's population carry H. pylori in their stomachs. It wouldn't be the first bacterium to emerge rather unexpectedly as a cause of foodborne disease - Listeria being the best known example - and it probably won't be the last.

The 2008 report certainly provides some encouraging news. For example, reported cases of the Europe's number one foodborne pathogen, Campylobacter, were down over 2007, though not by much, and the number of reports of human salmonellosis fell by a handy 13.5%. The incidence of Salmonella infections is falling in humans and in animals and the report suggests that this could be a result of new measures to reduce the prevalence of the pathogen in laying hens. Listeria infections were down too, although human VTEC infections bucked the trend and went up by almost 9% over the previous year.

So is some real progress being made? Well maybe, but a glance at the data on which the report is based reveals a problem. For instance, just take a look at the figures for cases of Campylobacter infection. There were about 190,000 reported cases across the EU in 2008, but nearly 140,000 came from just three countries, Germany, the Czech Republic and the UK. These three make up about 30% of the EU population, so it seems odd that their inhabitants suffer nearly three quarters of the reported cases of Campylobacter infection. The answer to this riddle is that they almost certainly don't. What we are seeing here is the result of wide differences in the effectiveness of zoonoses surveillance and notification systems around Europe. Some countries are much better than others in identifying and recording cases and even the best are inevitably under-reporting - perhaps by a factor of ten or more. So the true level of Campylobacter infection in the EU is anyone's guess. On the other hand you can only work with the data that you have. The current reporting system is a lot better than nothing, but the figures need to be interpreted with caution.