According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), globally 600 million people suffer
from food-borne diseases (FBD), and 420,000 people die as a result. The European Food
Safety Authority (EFSA) has stated that FBD are linked to the food industry, with the
most common means of transmission being due to poor food handling and hygiene by
food handlers working in the food industry. The aim of this research was to investigate the
effectiveness of mandatory food handler training programmes (FHTP) to prevent FBD in
Malaysia and Ireland. To do this, the FHTP existing in Malaysia and Ireland were
analysed, in addition to the legislation they fall under in each respective country.
Effectiveness was determined by investigating the level of food safety knowledge (FSK)
and food safety practices (FSP) of food handlers in Malaysia and Ireland. A systematic
literature review (SLR) and a narrative literature review (NLR) were conducted for this
research. The SLR was based on the PRISMA diagram, using the Confidence in the
Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative research (CERQual) approach to evaluate the
studies used for this research. A total of 8 Malaysian studies and 1 Irish study were used to
determine the level of FSK and FSP of food handlers in each respective country, to
examine the effectiveness of FHTP. The results of the studies used for this research have
depicted overall good FSP and FSK of food handlers in Malaysia and Ireland; yet trends
continue to show that food handlers are one of the biggest contributors to FBD,
demonstrating that FHTP are not effective in preventing FBD. The findings from this
research highlights that although these trainings can be an effective tool to prevent FBD, if
they are not executed correctly, food handlers will continue to contribute to FBD.
The incomplete identification of structural variants (SVs) from whole-genome sequencing data limits studies of human genetic diversity and disease association. Here, we apply a suite of long-read, short-read, strand-specific sequencing technologies, optical mapping, and variant discovery algorithms to comprehensively analyze three trios to define the full spectrum of human genetic variation in a haplotype-resolved manner. We identify 818,054 indel variants (<50 bp) and 27,622 SVs (≥50 bp) per genome. We also discover 156 inversions per genome and 58 of the inversions intersect with the critical regions of recurrent microdeletion and microduplication syndromes. Taken together, our SV callsets represent a three to sevenfold increase in SV detection compared to most standard high-throughput sequencing studies, including those from the 1000 Genomes Project. The methods and the dataset presented serve as a gold standard for the scientific community allowing us to make recommendations for maximizing structural variation sensitivity for future genome sequencing studies.