It has never been of more vital importance to be able to trace disease, illness and epidemic to its source location than today, as air travel passess 4 billion annual passengers, and almost one billion people fall sick to foodborne illness each year. The question is less now about how do we cure illness and disease, but rather, how do we cure it faster?
Bacteria
Another spread of E. coli across the United States and some parts of Canada this October has led to a full-bore investigation into what victims were eating, narrowing down to Romaine Lettuce.
However, despite the fact that reported cases were between October 13-31 2018, investigators were still retracing the steps of the lettuce to determine the source as of twenty days after the last reported case. It could be anywhere, whether it was a worker not washing their hands, an improperly cleaned machine at a packing/sorting facility, or an animal in the farmer’s fields. To have that many variables is a logistical nightmare, one that investigators need to sort through largely manually, and by paper, one step at a time: “reviewing records collected from restaurants and stores where sick people ate or shopped”.
This isn’t an uncommon occurrence either, with a study done by members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examining the occurrence of food borne illnesses in the U.S.A:
28 cases of which being e.coli breaking out in the U.S in the past decade.
Evidently, especially considering not all cases would even be reported, it is a noteworthy issue of the spread of sickness in society, increasing with global travel and super diseases. Due to the restraints on the traceback process, cases may take weeks to trace back, with the current e. coli investigation having taken 25 days to narrow it down to the coast of California (and this is in a developed country with a seemingly efficient investigation process).
This outbreak seems to feel a lot like groundhog day, with the exact same e. coli breakout from Romaine Lettuce contamination happening 5 months ago in June of this year, spreading across North America and killing five. This was the first time I really came to notice it, as my friend became sick after eating a ham sandwich he made with lettuce.
In this instance, the first illness was on March 22nd. It was confirmed and announced for the first time to the public on April 10th. It was deduced to most probably be romaine lettuce by April 13th by examining what people ate, with Romaine Lettuce being the most common. It wasn’t until May 9th that the lettuce was traced to Yuma. The case wasn’t closed until June 28th.
It took a month from when they figured it was lettuce to the date they narrowed in the probable location.
In this month everybody in the U.S (and to a degree, Canada) was advised not to eat Romaine Lettuce.
Assuming the average American eats 13.5 pounds of romaine lettuce a year, which equates to 1.125 pounds per person per month,
if everybody in the country is advised to not eat lettuce for a month, that is 366 MILLION pounds of lettuce wasted in the U.S from one e. coli breakout.
Add on the current breakout (October) and that number becomes greater than half a billion pounds of romaine lettuce wasted this year from e. coli breakouts in the U.S and drawn out investigation times.
From the infamous 2011 e. coli breakout in Germany that claimed dozens of lives, there was a reported $2.84 billion in human damages, and European farmers claiming losses of $470 million a week from unsold produce that rotted in fields and warehouses due to the warning against eating any vegetables from Spain.
This is not an inherent trait of food borne illnesses
Rather, only of the difficulty investigators have in figuring out where it came from. If only it could be traced back faster, and more reliably, the specific grocers and restaurants with the contaminated product can dispose of it and the whole mess can be over with.
But why isn’t that the case?
Because of these three primary restraints:
- In order to even start the trace back, investigators need to interview infected person(s) and try to find a correlation in the diet of one victim with that of another.
- Every grocer, restaurant, supplier, and farmer keeps their own records, some on paper, some in their database, some on a personal computer.
- The means of gathering, tracking and tracing this information requires investigators to go to each location and physically collect the data one step at a time.
This arrises because:
- There is no central database with food supply chain history. (Or any database for that matter).
- There is no means of tracking a product from farm to table (due to the lack of a database).
Blockchain
What if epidemics could be solved with a simple computer search?
Well, that would require millions of dollars and months, if not years, to design and build that database, deploy it, and maintain it. They would need to establish permissions, who has access to what, to setup accounts for everybody involved, to have the capacity and synchronization for it to be perpetually updating and drawn on, to protect it from bad actors and hackers, to have it securely accessible and private.
In order for this to work, it would need to be autonomous, run itself, have unlimited data capacity and automatic account generation, automatic ledger updating when new items come through a distribution point or are sold.
This database exists.
There is already a database system that has the architecture, permissions, best security on the planet, and capacity for all that data.
This would be the Blockchain protocol.
Blockchain is a highly modified advanced database, sort of like a Ferrari to a race horse, the horse is great, but the Ferrari is like, 660 times better. Blockchain differentiates itself by being able to give unlimited people access to its contents (limited or unlimited), and ability to update it according to its rules, without jeopardizing the security of the database. This is because each update is regarded as a transaction between two or more pieces of information: scanned barcode xyz at Farmer A updates both as being in posession of one another, when barcode xyz is scanned at grocery A, that barcode in the database is transacted from Farmer A to Grocery A, and according to the rules, the sole circumstance under which that may happen is if that barcode is scanned. I can then look at barcode xyz, which is currently at Grocery A, and see all the points it was ever scanned at (and the respective dates) all the way to its origin at Farmer A — and equally for Farmer A and all items that have been scanned at that point. The transacting of data in this way is why blockchain isn’t just a database, nobody can just go in and write whatever they want, there are immutable rules and immutable records that can not be erased or overwritten, and its greatest advantage lies in that it does not need to be stored in a central database that people are given access to, anybody can download it and connect to the rest of the participants in the network, thus becoming decentralized.
A “blockchain” isn’t bitcoin, it is a system used to store and transmit data directly from person to person, with unhackable security (based on cryptography). Data can be money, in the case of bitcoin, or property records, or medical records, or food supply chain records.
Walmart, Nestle, and others have partnered with IBM to use the Stellar blockchain to track food. Walmart’s vice president of Food Safety, Frank Yiannas says:
“…[blockchain] was able to shorten the time it took to track produce from six days to two seconds.”
Its easy, since blockchain already has the infrastructure setup, all that needs to happen is for food suppliers and distributors to begin uploading their food information to the blockchain, which can happen automatically.
When a barcode is scanned, it already automatically writes that into a specified database, which could now just as easily be blockchain based and shared by everybody who is scanning barcodes.
It would go like this:
All food suppliers and farmers have their respective registry on the blockchain database called Foodchain which tracks the food supply chain from farmer to table. Each person that purchases from a food supplier or farmer, should they not already be registered, are generated an account (traced to a credit card number or bank account, which is encrypted and only accessible to the account holder who has the keys), and their purchases and sales are recorded via barcode scanning (which is effectively a transaction, as exampled before).
Farmer A prints a barcode for the lettuce, scans it, generating that barcode on Foodchain, and updating both on Foodchain (barcode xyz scanned at farmer A), then this happens at every checkpoint the lettuce passes through in the supply chain, right up until the cashier scans the barcode for the last time, saying barcode xyz sold to customer A. Now, anybody can search that barcode in the Foodchain database and see each point it was scanned at, then look at those points and see what other items were scanned, so on and so forth.
So, what happens when there is an epidemic?
I go to the doctor in L.A {1 hour}
He diagnoses me with E. coli, sends notice through an automated system to the CDC that Brendan MacNeil has E. coli {10 minutes}
Then bob in NYC is flagged by his doctor as having E. coli {1 hour}
The CDC automatically sees these two, runs a check on Foodchain to compare the purchase history of Brendan MacNeil & Bob (entirely anonymously, as the blockchain is reading our history, not a human), Foodchain discovers we both transacted at Cafe 1 two days ago, it checks our purchases, we both had a ham sandwich. {<2 seconds}
Bob & I’s purchase history is flagged, every restaurant and grocer’s supply chain that we purchased from is now marked as on watch.
[for simplicity sake, Foodchain doesn’t need to have access to our purchase history, it would just make the first step easier, however, any way to compare our purchase history will suffice]
Joe in NYC is flagged with having e. coli {1 hour}
The blockchain checks his purchase history, no similarity to Bob & I, but he bought lettuce (barcode xyz) from a grocer, and that barcode was scanned at Farmer A, the same farmer that the lettuce purchased by Cafe 1 was scanned at. {<2 seconds}
Through having Bob & I flagged, when Joe’s purchase history is ran against ours, although there is no similarities, the food we purchased is marked with the same initial farmer, and thus comes back as being the result.
CDC is notified of:
Contaminated Item
Source of Item
Contact points
The exact stores and exact items that need to be quarantined and removed from shelves.
This entire triangulation process (which is simply an automated version of the current system) would take no more than 4 hours, if all three of us went to the doctor at the same time, with the longest wait time being us actually talking to the doctor, with the rest of the trace back taking seconds to check the database (blockchain) history.
Conclusion
Blockchain is not a cure-all as many would like to believe for all of our problems. It is often akin to bringing a gun to a knife fight, or a Ferrari to a horse race — simply unnecessary excess. But, in some circumstances the Ferrari is imperative, in circumstances highly dependant on immutable records, long chains of data that are frequently updated, and widely accessible systems that need to maintain their security with distribution. The food supply chain industry would be one of those. There is a pressing need for tracing food, but no way to track and record it currently. Epidemics and breakouts will contiue to persist, if not grow in risk, and as of yet we have failed to evolve to this.
Blockchain will solve that.
The median cost of damages of an Atlantic hurricane in the U.S is $1.8 billion, if we could eliminate that by implementing a national software system,
would we?
