Tecnología Alimentaria y Salud Humana. El Caso de la Leche y los Productos Lácteos. La Industria Alimentaria como Estrategia Sanitaria. Producciones Artesanales y Seguridad Alimentaria (Discurso de entrada del doctor Francisco Luis Dehesa Santisteban con ocasión de su ingreso en la Real Academia de Medicina del País Vasco en sesión celebrada el 14 de febrero de 2011)

Introduction

The author's interest in food and food-related diseases started at school and continued when he studied Veterinary Science at university. This interest further intensified throughout his career in the City Council of Bilbao.

Throughout history, the food-health relationship has been viewed from distinct perspectives and is currently acknowledged to be highly important from the medical and healthcare point of view. The same can be said of food technology, which offers safe and high-quality products to consumers.

Heat treatment to preserve milk revolutionized the sale of this essential product in industrial societies. Pasteurization, named after Louis Pasteur, who was the first to discover and systematically apply this technique, was supported by numerous physicians and veterinary surgeons as the best method to prevent the transmission of infectious diseases through milk consumption and became mandatory in most western countries in the first half of the twentieth century.

From the perspective of the principles of hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP), traditional methods of making cured sheep's milk cheese, such as Idiazabal, use empirical preventive criteria.