Britain’s best known food safety expert, Professor Hugh Pennington, will be speaking to almost 850 delegates from 50 countries – including many leading scientists – attending Food Micro 2008 which is exploring a huge range of microbiological issues surrounding the safety and quality of food.

The Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen will ask whether lessons have been learned from the 1996 Lanarkshire E. coli outbreak when 21 elderly people died after eating contaminated meat from a Wishaw butcher.

Professor Pennington chaired the public inquiry into the case which was the world’s worst recorded outbreak of E. coli food poisoning.

He is currently chairing the public inquiry into the 2005 E. coli O157 outbreak in Wales which claimed the life of a five-year-old and left 150, mainly schoolchildren, ill. Again contaminated meat supplied by a butcher was to blame.

Professor Hugh Pennington’s talk entitled Groundhog Day Again! takes place on Thursday, September 4.

For more on conference, go here.  We will look for anything interesting that comes out of it, and pass it alone.