New Products from the Council to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response (CIFOR)

BACKGROUND:   The Council to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response (CIFOR) is a multidisciplinary collaboration of 8 diverse national associations and 3 federal agencies whose goal is to improve methods at the local, state, and federal levels to detect, investigate, control, and prevent foodborne disease outbreaks. The CIFOR member organizations represent epidemiology and environmental health programs, public health laboratories, and regulatory agencies involved in foodborne disease surveillance and outbreak response. The food industry is represented on the standing CIFOR Industry Workgroup.

METHODS: CIFOR identifies barriers to rapid detection and response to foodborne disease outbreaks and develops projects to address those barriers.  Workgroups composed of CIFOR Council members and other experts are formed to manage the projects.

RESULTS: CDC will join a panel of three other CIFOR Council members who are also CSTE members and who will present and discuss the following CIFOR products: the Second Edition of the CIFOR Guidelines for Foodborne Disease Outbreak Response to be published in February 2014, the Second Edition of the CIFOR Guidelines Toolkit to be published in the winter of 2014/15, the CIFOR Epi/Lab Integrated Reporting Software available now, and the Outbreaks of Undetermined Etiology (OUE) Guidelines project to be completed in the fall of 2014. The panel members will provide useful updates on these products and invite robust questions and interaction from the audience.  

CONCLUSIONS:   CIFOR serves as an effective collaboration that has already produced a widely used and respected set of guidelines for detecting and responding to foodborne disease outbreaks.  The publication in 2014 of the Second Edition of the Guidelines will benefit local, state, and federal officials involved in epidemiology, laboratory, and environmental health activities related to these outbreaks.  Additionally, the Second Edition of the CIFOR Guidelines Toolkit will enable jurisdictions to conduct thorough self-assessments of their illness detection and outbreak investigation processes. The Epi/Lab reporting software will enable faster detection of illness clusters, and the OUE guidelines will help states to ultimately find the etiologies in a greater percentage of foodborne outbreaks. In summary, this panel will highlight the value of these CIFOR products and thereby demonstrate the public health value of supporting a multidisciplinary collaboration of experts from local, state, and federal levels.