Indiana Food Safety and Defense Task Force Meetings

The Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) provides the staff support for the Indiana Food Safetyand Defense Task Force Meetings. This Task Force was formerly known as the Indiana Food Security andBioterrorism Preparedness Task Force and has been meeting since 2003. Food Safety and Defense TaskForces are a critical and effective tool to promote and protect the public health; they create an effectivestate-wide infrastructure for outreach, response, and information sharing. Stakeholders includemembers from government, industry, academia, law enforcement and consumer groups. Meetings aimto foster communication, cooperation and collaboration within Indiana and agendas center on foodsafety and defense topics.Improvements are underway to implement panel discussions, exercises, and functional projects duringTask Force Meetings. Members are being encouraged to utilize FoodSHIELD to build working groupsharing capabilities; by providing food safety and defense related experiences, links, and videos.Additionally, actions have been taken to record meetings and upload onto FoodSHIELD to makemeetings available to all members especially those unable to attend the meeting. Ongoingcommunication will be conducted to request feedback and suggestions for future topics, projects,training, or exercises.The Task Force meetings promote the integration of an efficient statewide food safety and defensesystem that maximizes the protection of public health through the prevention, early detection andcontainment of food-borne illness. It also provides a forum for open dialogue between the industry,regulators, academia and other stakeholders who have an interest in food safety and defense and bringskey individuals together.