Day 107 - 24 Mar 95 - Page 33
1 million a year?
2 A. If it was 3,000, yes, it would be a million a year.
3 Now, in that sense a one in million chance of failure is an
4 unacceptable failure rate, because that would mean you
5 would have a food poisoning incident once a year. That, of
6 course, would be a commercial disaster.
7
8 Q. I have included in mine everything from just feeling a bit
9 nauseous to getting really ill, anyway, I am interested
10 just to hear what you say.
11 A. I think it is worth elaborating, my Lord, that I have a
12 lot of private restaurant clients and at the same time
13 monitor public statistics on food poisoning, and I am
14 convinced from those dual sources of information that the
15 actual number of reported incidents that actually reach the
16 attention of public authorities is but the tip of an
17 enormous -----
18
19 Q. I understand all this. I just wanted to understand what
20 you meant by "hygienic". If I even substituted one for the
21 12 in a million or said one in 10 million, by your
22 definition -- I do not want to be unfair to you -- provided
23 you get any incidence of food poisoning at all, does that
24 mean the system is unhygienic?
25 A. Yes, I do believe so, because what I believe is that an
26 hygienic system is one which, essentially, incorporates
27 fail safe mechanisms, so that if things go wrong the system
28 is so designed that that food does not reach the public,
29 and the normal way of doing this is you incorporate safety
30 margins and procedural checks into your organisation and
31 into your production that are sufficient to prevent -----
32
33 Q. Absolutely? I cannot even reduce it to absurdity?
34 I cannot say one in a thousand million cases?
35 A. In the sense that food poisoning is so easy to prevent
36 and that fast food organisms normally are so easy to kill,
37 are so sensitive, are so vulnerable, that it is not beyond
38 the whit of man to design these systems which are not
39 onerous, which will give that guarantee. In a sense, my
40 Lord, you have to work very hard to produce food
41 poisoning. Therefore, I am very unforgiving of operations
42 which cannot manage systems in such a way that they end up
43 producing food poisoning.
44
45 MR. MORRIS: Mr. North, you said something like 30,000 confirmed
46 salmonella cases a year?
47 A. Yes.
48
49 Q. And the under-reporting is anything between 10 and 100?
50 A. Possibly.
51
52 Q. So it may be anything between 300,000 and 3,000,000 a year
53 cases?
54 A. Yes.
55
56 Q. Approximately, what numbers are actually identified where a
57 source is identified?
58 A. Very, very few.
59
60 Q. What region are we talking about, 500 or 1,000 or something
