FOOD ANIMAL RESIDUE AVOIDANCE DATABANK (FARAD)

The FARAD program is a national food safety program funded for 40 years since 1982 by USDA. The program is a collaborative effort with five regional centers: Kansas State University--Olathe (KSUO), North Carolina State University, University of California--Davis, University of Florida, and Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. The goal of FARAD is to provide the most updated information and scientific tools to help the production of safe foods of animal origin. The program accomplishes this goal through its objectives: (1) to identify, extract, assemble, evaluate and distribute reviewed information about residue avoidance and mitigation to people involved in residue avoidance programs; (2) to develop tools that allow people to predict proper withdrawal intervals after extralabel drug use. To continue to fulfill the mission of FARAD, during 2022-2023, the specific objectives at KSUO include: (1) to develop interfaces by which FARAD responders can access the KSUO comparative medicine databases and associated computational tools, as well as access relevant global data, (2) to pursue the goal of developing novel AI technologies practical to food-animal production for collecting, organizing, merging, and cleaning data and help easily submit queries to obtain information regarding the datasets of Global maximum residue limits (MRLs) and withdrawal periods (WDPs), and (3) to conduct research in designing a full-text retrieval system that will enable the creation of an information retrieval database that can be easily queried, performing metadata analysis on bibliographic records in veterinary medicine as well as those validated by the current FARAD database.