Report Measures Decline in the Number of Completed Outbreak Investigations
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has added another year of results to its standing analysis of foodborne disease outbreak investigations and the biggest new finding is that states are completing fewer probes than at any time in the past decade.
The "Outbreak Alert!'' report said that nearly 1,100 outbreaks -- including E. coli HUS outbreaks --were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2007 (the latest year of completed figures), but in only 378 cases did states identify both a food and the pathogen, which is the mark of a completed investigation..jpg)
In the early years, the number of completed outbreak investigations improved and reached a high of 44 percent in 2001. "Unfortunately, the percentage has gradually declined from 44 percent to 34 percent in 2007, the lowest percentage of fully investigated outbreaks in any year since 1999,'' the report said.
CSPI says the results suggest that states may have been devoting fewer resources to tracking down the causes of outbreaks. Such a trend is troubling in a food safety system that depends heavily on state and local health departments for detection of outbreaks.
Fewer completed investigations mean that less information is available to the CDC -- downgrading their ability to identify problems in the food safety system or issue recalls to protect the public.
The latest findings by CSPI are another reason why national food safety law firm Pritzker Olsen is actively pushing for the completion of food safety reform legislation that began this year with passage of a bill in the House of Representatives. Sometime in 2010, the Senate will take up the issue, which the Obama Administration has identified as a priority.
An important element of the food safety overhaul calls for beefing up the network of detection via more resources to regionally strong labs and better communication between state and federal public health investigators. That is the kind of approach the U.S. needs to shift to a food safety culture that is more focused on preventing disease and limiting the spread of outbreaks.
