Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Susan Duncan, Dairy and Sensory Evaluation

Bill Eigel,                Food Biochemistry

Joe Marcy:               Food Processing

Merle Pierson: Food Microbiology

 Sean O’Keefe: Food Chemistry

Susan Sumner:   Food Safety

Walter Hartman:    Dairy Plant Manager whartman@vt.edu

Kim Waterman:  Dairy Chemistry    kwater@vt.edu

UPDATES AT VIRGINIA TECH

Valley Rich Dairy Closes Roanoke Plant

Valley Rich Dairy will cease processing and bottling operations at its Roanoke plant on August 5 th . It will also close 15 of its 17 distribution facilities in Virginia , North Carolina and West Virginia by September 9 th .

The Roanoke plant opened in 1962 as a Sealtest plant. Following several mergers, Valley Rich Dairy was founded in 1982. In 2001, it became a subsidiary of Dallas-based National Dairy Holdings, LP, which today distributes products in 16 states.

More than 30 schools in Floyd County , Pulaski County , Radford City and Montgomery County collectively buy their milk, juice, and ice cream from Valley Rich. These schools are currently looking for new vendors and expect to pay more for their dairy products.

Valley Rich and the Department of Food Science at Virginia Tech have enjoyed a long term association that will be greatly missed.

FFA Dairy Foods Contest Held at VA Tech's Department of Food Science

Teams from four Virginia high schools participated in the 2005 FFA Dairy Foods Career Development event held at the Department of Food Science on June 27 th . The contest was very challenging and included a written test, identification of 10 milk off-flavors and 10 cheese types. Students also performed the California mastitis test, located defects in milking equipment and identified 10 products as “real or artificial” dairy samples. Sherando's team placed first in the contest, and Turner Ashby's team came in closely as second. Congratulations to all participants!

Capitol Hill Ice Cream Party

The 23rd Annual Capitol Hill Ice Cream Party was held on June 16 th in Washington , D.C. The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) hosts the event each year to celebrate National Dairy Month and to showcase their activities. The party also serves to bring attention to current issues concerning the dairy industry. This year, 13 Food Science faculty, staff and students made the trip to serve ice cream and root beer floats to more than five thousand people, including many senators and Congressional members.

  Reminder

Don't forget to mark your calendars for September 13 th . That's the date of the 19 th Annual Dairy Quality Control Conference!

HOT TOPICS AND DAIRY ISSUES

Journal Article Describes Threat to Milk

Roanoke Times AP 6/29/05– A scientific article that says terrorists could poison thousands of people through the milk supply – withheld initially at the government's request – has been published despite continuing objections, after the National Academy of Sciences concluded it wouldn't help potential attackers.

The study by Lawrence Wein (Professor of management science) and Yifan Liu (graduate student in computational and mathematical engineering) of Stanford University discusses such questions as how terrorists could release botulinum toxin into the U.S. milk supply and what effective amounts might be. The paper is entitled, “Analyzing a Bioterror Attack on the Food Supply: The Case of Botulinum Toxin in Milk”.

Bruce Alberts, president of the academy, said in an accompanying editorial that a terrorist would not learn anything useful from the article about the minimum amount of toxin to use. “And we can detect no other information in this article important for a terrorist that is not already immediately available to anyone who has access to information from the World Wide Web. We are convinced that the guidance offered in this article on how to anticipate, model, and minimize a botulinum toxin attack could be valuable for bio-defense.

Science has a long tradition of publishing new information in peer-reviewed journals, providing an opportunity for other researchers to confirm findings and advance to a next step. However, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, some government officials have raised concerns that by obtaining biotechnology data, terrorists might be able to engineer deadlier versions of diseases.

The paper and editorial were published June 28 th on the academy's internet website and appeared in the July 12 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper was originally planned for publication on May 30, but was withheld at the request of Stewart Simonson, assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, who contended the paper was a “road map for terrorists”, and publication was not in the interests of the United States .

Simonson said the paper provided too much detail on potentially vulnerable areas of the milk supply, processing and distribution systems and argued that its publication “could have very serious health and national security consequences.

Health and Human Services spokesman Bill Hall said Tuesday that the agency still thinks the material shouldn't have been published.

“We respect the academy's position but we don't agree with it,” Hall said. The “consequences could be dire and it will be HHS, and not the academy, that will have to deal with it.”

Wein said Tuesday that he was surprised when Simonson raised objections to the paper. He said he had met with officials of HHS, the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the dairy industry last fall to discuss the paper.

After that, Stuart Nightingale, an emergency preparedness official at HHS, asked to see the paper, Wein said. He said he sent it to Nightingale, and when he didn't hear back, he assumed there was no problem.

The report describes the milk supply chain from cow to consumer. It describes how the milk industry is vulnerable because individual farmers send their product to central processing facilities, thereby allowing milk from many locations to mix. Terrorists could poison the supply by putting boulinum toxin into one of the 5,500-gallon trucks that picks up milk daily at farms or by dropping the toxin into raw-milk silos, which hold roughly 50,000 gallons each. Pasteurization would destroy some but not all of the toxin, and a millionth of a gram of toxin may be enough to kill a person.

The standard tests to detect botulinum toxin take too long to be useful, Dr. Wein said in an interview, although he recently learned of a new test that takes only 15 minutes to perform. Assays such as this could mitigate, or even thwart, an attack, he said. To alleviate the risk of such an attack, the FDA has issued guidelines for the dairy industry, such as making sure that milk trucks and tanks are locked. Dr. Wein argues that those voluntary measures should be required by law.

One gram of botulinum toxin could affect as many as 100,000 people and 10 grams up to 568,000 people, the researchers concluded. A gram is about the weight of a paper clip. The paper is available on the journal's website at www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0408526102