Pamela Valquerizo

Fifteen years of this work comes down to one idea: contamination is not bad luck. It happens at identifiable points, for identifiable reasons, and those points can be controlled.

Pamela Valquerizo is a veterinarian whose career has been spent inside the systems that keep meat, eggs, milk and their derivatives safe, from farm and slaughter through processing to retail. Her specialization is the poultry and egg industry, where she has worked at the scale where decisions carry real consequence.

As Chief Veterinarian for an egg production company responsible for approximately 20% of the egg supply of the State of Amazonas, Brazil, she led sanitary control, risk analysis and traceability programs across the operation. That role shaped how she works: control programs have to survive contact with a working production floor, or they exist only on paper.

Across her career she has implemented HACCP, GMP and FSQA programs for food businesses of varying size, designed farm biosecurity measures including strategies against Avian Influenza (H5N1), and trained food-handling teams to meet national and international standards. Her technical background includes biotechnology, genetic engineering and molecular techniques such as PCR applied to contaminant detection and outbreak investigation.

She is the author of three books on veterinary inspection and food safety, and a published researcher in the Journal of Agricultural Sciences Research, where her work proposes an integrated biosecurity model for small and medium agri-food enterprises, the operations that regulation and technical support usually reach last.

She works between two regulatory worlds, Brazilian and North American, and much of her writing addresses what each system does well and where the gaps between them create risk.