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FDA Releases High-Tech Food Protection Aid
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has developed a computer program to assess the food industry’s vulnerabilities to chemical, biological, and radiological contamination, the agency announced earlier this month (see GSN, Oct. 17, 2006). Adapting risk assessment attributes from a U.S. military acronym, the software program is called CARVER+Shock, with the first word standing for criticality, accessibility, recuperability, vulnerability, effect, and recognizability. “Shock” acknowledges the sweeping psychological turmoil expected in the wake of a food-borne terrorist attack. “FDA’s goal in developing the CARVER+Shock software is to maximize protection of the American food supply,” said David Acheson, FDA assistant commissioner for food protection, in a press release. The paper-less platform expedites the process of assessing the vulnerability of food industry plants to acts of terrorism. Formerly, government inspectors would need two to three days to question up to 30 plant employees, according to Donald Kautter Jr., acting supervisor of the FDA food defense oversight team. “What we’ve done is taken that face-to-face interaction and put it into a software program so that the questions and discussion are posed by the computer,” he said in the release. CARVER+Shock is available for download on the FDA’s Web site. It requires a small team from the food plant and lasts less than a day, according to the press release. Including more than 100 questions, the program prompts employees about vulnerable areas within their facility and the food production process while pinpointing the greatest threat type. “CARVER helps industry think like an attacker so that it can identify any weak spots and put countermeasures into place,” Kautter said in the release (U.S. Food and Drug Administration release, June 15).
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