Wal-Mart Tackles Food Safety with Test of Blockchain Technology

If you shop at Wal-Mart, you might be buying packaged produce unlike any ever sold in a U.S. store.The sliced apples or cut broccoli -- the merchant won't say exactly what's involved -- are being used to test blockchain, a new database technology. If successful, the trial could change how Wal-Mart Stores, which serves some 260 million customers a week, monitors food and takes action when something goes wrong. That could spur big leaps in food safety, cut costs and save lives.Like most merchants, the world's largest retailer struggles to identify and remove food that's been recalled. When a customer becomes ill, it can take days to identify the product, shipment and vendor. With the blockchain, Wal-Mart will be able to obtain crucial data from a single receipt, including suppliers, details on how and where food was grown and who inspected it. The database extends information from the pallet to the individual package."It gives them an ability to have an accounting from origin to completion," said Marshal Cohen, an analyst at researcher NPD Group Inc. "If there's an issue with an outbreak of E. coli, this gives them an ability to immediately find where it came from. That's the difference between days and minutes."It's also the difference between pulling a few tainted packages and yanking all the spinach from hundreds of stores, according to Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart."With blockchain, you can do strategic removals, and let consumers and companies have confidence," Yiannas said. "We believe that enhanced traceability is good for other aspects of the food systems. We hope you could capture other important attributes that would inform decisions around food flows, and even get more efficient at it."More than 1,000 foodborne outbreaks investigated by state and local health departments are reported each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. The CDC estimates roughly 48 million people are afflicted annually, with 128,000 hospitalized and 3,000 dying. Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. has suffered a year of falling sales as a result of several outbreaks.In October, Wal-Mart started tracking two products using blockchain: a packaged produce item in the U.S., and pork in China. While only two items were included, the test involved thousands of packages shipped to multiple stores.The blockchain is a distributed ledger where companies doing business with one another, such as growers, distributors and retailers, can record transactions securely. The database's strength lies in its trustworthiness: the difficulty of reversing or changing what's been recorded. The blockchain database can also hold much more data than what retailers get today, providing tools for more detailed analysis.That could help Wal-Mart deliver food to stores faster, reducing spoilage and waste. Cutting costs is critical for all retailers. Last year, retail sales rose only 2.1 percent, the smallest gain since 2009, according to Retail Industry Leaders Association. Traditional offline retailers continue to be pressured by Amazon.com Inc. and its efficient supply chain.If the tests are successful, Wal-Mart will expand them to multiple food items in both countries, Yiannis said."So far things are flowing smoothly and as expected," he said.Wal-Mart has been at the forefront of adopting new technologies before. It began installing new chip-card readers at U.S. checkout counters 10 years before the deadline mandated by credit-card networks like Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. This summer, it took Walmart Pay nationwide, becoming one of the first large retailers to launch its own mobile-payment service. It's also expanding its online grocery delivery service.The blockchain, a technology that only came onto the scene in 2009, is already being widely tested by companies in the financial, healthcare and natural-resource industries. Companies like International Business Machines Corp., the Nasdaq and BHP Billiton Ltd. have deployed or are planning to deploy it to run their businesses more efficiently.Wal-Mart is using blockchain technology co-developed by IBM. In October, the company opened the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center in Beijing. It also announced, with IBM and Tsinghua University, a collaboration using the blockchain to improve the way food is tracked, transported and sold to Chinese consumers. If Wal-Mart adopts the blockchain to track food worldwide, it could become of the largest deployments of the technology to date."They are setting the new standards in terms of how technology can be implemented to solve a problem that's been with us for ages," said Paul Chang, global supply chain subject matter expert at IBM.Author Information:Olga Kharif
More stories by Olga Kharif 8. WHO no longer considers Zika a global health emergency
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Lena H. Sun · NATIONAL, HEALTH-SCIENCE · Nov 19, 2016 - 3:31 AMThe Zika virus that has spread to more than 50 countries is no longer considered an international public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared Friday. But the change in designation does not represent a downgrading of Zika's importance, officials said.The WHO labeled Zika an international emergency in February primarily to understand what was causing the "extraordinary clustering" of microcephaly cases in Brazil, the epicenter of the outbreak, said David Heymann, who chairs the expert panel that made the recommendation. When the emergency was declared, he said, researchers had not yet proven that the mosquito-borne virus causes the severe birth defect characterized by an abnormally small head and underdeveloped brain.Studies have since established the link between Zika and microcephaly. Now, the best way to tackle the virus and its serious complications is for the WHO to manage "this significant and enduring public health challenge" within the organization, Heymann said. That will allow for a more sustained focus, with more dedicated resources and expertise, he added."This represents an escalation into a major activity within WHO," he said at a press conference in Geneva. "If anything, it's escalated in importance."Peter Salama, a senior WHO official, said Zika represents a set of long-term issues, including neurological complications in children as well as adults, family planning and maternal reproductive health, that will require a comprehensive research agenda and sustained financing over many years.Yet many public health officials and experts are worried that this technical distinction may be lost and end up sending the wrong message about Zika - even as new cases seem to be emerging in Asia.The virus, which is primarily transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, can be passed from a pregnant women to her fetus and cause a host of grave birth defects beyond microcephaly. These problems are collectively known as congenital Zika syndrome. The degree of fetal risk when a pregnant woman has been infected is still unknown.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been leading the Zika response in the United States and playing a major surveillance and research role in Brazil and other countries. It stressed Friday that despite the "technical declaration" by the WHO, Zika infection continues to be a serious threat to pregnant women, babies born to pregnant women with Zika and their families."There is still much to learn about the disease," the CDC statement said. "We need to learn more about Zika and its associated complications of microcephaly and other brain abnormalities, such as when Zika infection poses highest risk to a fetus during pregnancy and the magnitude of that risk. It remains crucially important that pregnant women avoid traveling to areas with local transmission of Zika, because of the devastating complications that can occur in fetuses that become infected during pregnancy."The CDC said there is also urgent need to develop improved diagnostics and vaccines that can prevent infection and spread of the disease. Public health experts and clinicians need to better understand the risk of neurological complications in affected infants, children and adults, the risks of mosquito-borne and sexual transmission of Zika and how best to prevent Zika infection, the agency said.The WHO's expert panel extensively discussed how the change in designation would be interpreted and whether that would make it harder to raise money for the international response, Heymann said.In the end, Salama said, the organization hopes its donors will recognize that Zika is here to stay and that the world will need to deal with it for years to come. Zika and microcephaly will surface wherever there are vectors that can transmit the disease, the experts said.Asked why the WHO did not drop the emergency designation in April when the CDC concluded that the virus causes microcephaly, Heymann said there were still outstanding worries about the upcoming Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and "understanding what the risks were," he said.The experts also addressed the continuing mystery about the relatively few cases of microcephaly outside of Brazil. Most of the 2,300 confirmed cases of microcephaly are in that country, with a few dozen also reported in Colombia, where there was a large Zika outbreak."The number of confirmed cases [of microcephaly] is less than what we did imagine," Salama said at the press conference. "But we know it's probably not the whole story." He cited biases in how cases were reported that could mean a "significant underestimate" of the toll worldwide.So far, 28 countries have reported cases of microcephaly. Nineteen have reported adult cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause paralysis, "so even though Brazil tops the list, this is not confined to Brazil nor will it be in the future," Salama said.Researchers have been investigating whether other factors could explain Zika's damage in Brazil's hardest-hit northeast region, including genetic factors, environmental contaminants and co-infections.A presentation by Brazilian officials to the WHO's Zika expert panel has not yet found a "co-factor" to explain why Zika is causing so much more microcephaly in Brazil, Heymann said. However, "these studies can't be done overnight."(c) 2016, Bloomberg
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