Call for papers: Food Defence

A special issue of International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition and Public Health

Immediately after the 9/11 attack, the World Health Organisation (WHO) stressed the risk “of deliberate contamination of food for human consumption with biological, chemical and physical agents or radionuclear materials for the purpose of causing injury or death to civilian populations and/or disrupting social, economic or political stability”. Thereafter, many countries started developing “food defence strategies” and have classified the food supply chain as a nationally critical structure. These strategies encompass methodologies, tools and procedures to prevent, contrast and repress any malicious manipulation or alteration of food done by terrorists, criminals, mythomaniacs and also by disgruntled internal company staff.

This special issue aims at setting the state of the art, both in research and application, by providing an opportunity for presenting recent achievements with regard to the development and application of models and techniques for the analysis of the threats, vulnerabilities and counter measures developed for improving the safety and the continuity of the food supply chain with respect to any type of malicious manipulation or attack.

In the contest of this issue, original research papers, innovative application results and reviews are solicited in relevant aspects of food defence, including but not limited to:

• Food defence/food security strategies and policies
• Anti-tampering systems and technologies
• Risk analysis of the food supply chain
• Impact analysis of food contamination
• Technologies and procedures to prevent, deter and contrast food manipulation
• Threats analysis of contaminating agents
• Social implications of food insecurity
• Case studies on risk analysis for malicious manipulation of food supply chains

Important Dates
Deadline for draft manuscript submission: 15 October, 2010
(Please inform the Guest Editors about your intention to contribute at your earliest convenience)
Notification of review results: 30 January, 2011
Deadline for revised manuscript submission: 28 February, 2011