Joelle Mosso

Fresh Produce Food Safety Professional | Food Microbiology Risk Expert| AI & Predictive Food Safety Data

Former USDA NACMCF & USDA NOSB member

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

I’m a produce food safety professional focused on microbiology, public health, risk reduction, and the systems that keep food safe.

My goal is simple: help make complex food safety issues clearer, more useful, and more actionable.

If that’s your world too, follow along.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

Monitoring recreational water is critical to help ensure that the general public don't expose themselves to risks that may make them sick.

This is a great parallel with what we could and should do to monitor agricultural water (surface and aquifers) in key agricultural areas.

With better data, we will have better information to prevent risks from reaching consumers.

[CDC @CDCgov]

It’s not always obvious when water is unsafe. Check online or near the water for warnings from local officials. Follow the advice to avoid germs, unsafe conditions, or other hazards in the water.
More tips for staying healthy at lakes and beaches: https://t.co/3H5KxXoY5i

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

Might want to revisit why FDA PSR rule only requires sprouts to be testing for E.coli O157 and Salmonella.

These 3 serotypes of E.coli could have been detected if they were included in the testing requirement.

I am hope we will learn more about how all this happened, but longer term, it would be helpful for FDA to update the rule/guidance to look beyond 1 strain of 400-500 Shiga Toxin producing E.coli that cause illness.

https://t.co/uWAKcFg8ai

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

The Nobel Prize Award: John F. Enders shared the 1954 Nobel Prize with Thomas H. Weller and Frederick C. Robbins for discovering how to grow poliovirus in tissue cultures.

Enders used the exact same tissue-culture method to isolate the live measles virus from a sick schoolboy named David Edmonston in 1954.

Development of the Vaccine: Enders and his colleague Dr. Thomas Peebles successfully isolated the measles virus in 1954.Release:

The first licensed live-attenuated measles vaccine (derived from the Edmonston-B strain) was released to the public in 1963.

Impact: The vaccine rapidly reduced millions of annual U.S. infections and deaths down to near-zero levels prior to the modern resurgence.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

I have been thinking of that a lot lately.

While my focus is on food safety, the same thought process applies. In the US, we have been fortunate with a very safe and robust food supply - so much so that we have taken for granted all the resources needed to keep it that way.

Food safety and public health is easy to cut when you don't see evidence (illness, outbreaks, etc.) of why you need it. Quickly, after it's gone, you realize how critically the system depended on it. Especially since the general consumers have come to expect that all foods are equally safe - they're not.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

First, this is horrific and horrible for the communities in this fire.

Second, is that these wildfires are becoming far too common to consider them freak events. Call it climate change, call it weather catastrophes...call it whatever you want.

These are now events that should be predicted for and go beyond risks to housing. Food safety is rapidly changing in these climates as well, and a lingering risk far after these horrific climate events.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

Food safety has always been considered incorrectly as a cost center -- frequently the focus of cost reductions and "nice to haves" but not necessary needs.

We need to demand at the federal and state levels not just the appropriate funding and resources (we DON'T have them now for certain) & require that those systems shift to become prevention-based.

Food safety and security are paramount in our society and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Extreme weather conditions can have major impacts on farmers and their crops at a time when they’re already facing high production costs. https://t.co/gCdlWwTtul

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

A jalapeño can become salsa, guacamole, dressing, prepared meals—and dozens of SKUs.

That’s why traceback is only half the job. Once a source is identified, public health also depends on knowing where every affected lot went—and fast.

The ongoing Salmonella Javiana outbreak linked to jalapeños has reached 431 illnesses in 32 states, and FDA is tracking multiple downstream recalls involving products made with the implicated peppers.

We need to demand more of our supply chain and shift from reaction to prediction.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

A recall protects consumers today that have yet to eat these items (already 55 victims), but the true work and information we need is the root-cause to help consumers tomorrow (if the data exists to truly do one).

Consumers will also need to know how and what we learn since food safety confidence is at a low. It will be interesting and important to learn how the systems failed here, including the daily testing for these pathogens that did not detect their presence.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

The federal departments that manage food are working from a system and resources that are underfunded and structured wrong for prevention-based food safety. That has always been the case, but now is more so given fewer resources.

There are amazing people working in these roles. But, we need to flip risk management to prevention and give them the right resources to give us the outcomes we seek.

[Frank Yiannas @frankyiannas]

My segment yesterday with News Nation.

Straight Talk. Tough questions. Honest & science-based answers.

Are recalls a sign that the food safety system is working?

We shouldn’t praise a food safety system for how well it recalls contaminated food. Instead, we should judge it by how well it prevents contaminated food from ever reaching consumers in the first place.

Having stated that, there is no need to panic.  Our food system remains among the safest in the world.  But as these outbreaks and recalls have shown, there is more we CAN and MUST do to protect consumers.

Stay safe & keep informed. #SmarterFoodSafety

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

Completely agree! It is frustrating that reactions to recalls/outbreak events has often been we need better inspections and outbreak resources.

Yes, we need those. But no, that is not all we need.

Food safety events are not rare events, they should be looked at as expected events that we need to build risk-based and prevention-based systems to address.

We need to flip the system to be prevention- and prediction-based.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

What the Test Result Doesn’t Tell You:

More testing does not automatically mean more knowledge.

If contamination is clustered, the real question is whether your sampling design gives you a realistic chance of finding it.

Test less blindly. Sample more intelligently.

That principle is especially timely because a newly published Journal of Food Protection study found that conventional grab sampling can miss localized contamination and evaluated aggregated cloth sampling as a way to increase the surface area represented by a sample.

https://t.co/uch9I3cfzK

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

Food safety validation often hinges on a single, yearly audit from a certification body.

It is common for food importers to use commercial third-party certifications to prove a foreign supplier meets food safety expectations.

In practice, a farm’s multi-million dollar access to the U.S. market can sometimes rest entirely on a single private audit lasting just 1 to 3 days.

As with anything, a brief snapshot of a facility may or may not show how a whole supply chain works.

We can (and must) design better transparency and risk management in our food system.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

@NewsHour It's not just impacts to yields and production. Extreme weather events have significant impact on food safety - foodborne pathogens, contamination, etc.

We need adaptive and risk-based systems to enable our supply chain to be resilient.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

We've seen a lot recently on imported fresh produce having a problem. As a consumer, you likely have questions on how it gets here.

Most U.S. produce imports rely on a "paperwork honor system." The FDA requires importers to verify that foreign suppliers follow the Produce Safety Rule.

Yet in practice, a desktop folder of signed PDFs and outdated water tests satisfies the law without actually proving field-level sanitation.

Failing to maintain these plans is the #1 FDA import citation—compliance is less about active food safety and more about a bulletproof paper trail.

💡It's time to demand the prevention- and risk-based system we deserve.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

If we are going to have a serious conversation about UPFs and other overall food-related risks, we also need a better conversation about relative risk.

Otherwise, we may inadvertently encourage them to eat more of what we already know is not helping them stay healthy tomorrow.

There is no zero-risk food. Fresh produce can carry some limited food safety risk. So can almost any other food. And some of those alternatives carry additional short- and long-term health risks.

What matters in food choice is magnitude, probability and perspective. 

This matters as we intensify debates around UPFs, food dyes, contaminants, etc. in the broader food system.

We cannot encourage people to eat more whole foods (including fresh produce) while communicating about risks associated with fresh foods in ways that make them seem uniquely dangerous. Or, more importantly, more dangerous than the food alternatives.

Provide perspective. Don’t pretend any food is risk-free.

[Joelle Mosso @JoelleMosso]

There's been a lot of micro testing talked about these days due to all the outbreaks.

Think of testing like getting on and off a bathroom scale - it tells you a number every time, but it doesn't make you lose weight unless you do something with that information (ex: run, eat less, swim).

Testing is an important and critical tool in food safety. But, it often is given far more value than it deserves.