From Surveillance to Intervention: Innovative Approaches to Use Surveillance Data to Inform Foodborne Disease Prevention Strategies

Key Objectives:
To present and discuss with state partners some of the innovative epidemiological approaches recently developed to use surveillance data to inform foodborne disease prevention strategies and to highlight the importance of surveillance data provided by local, state, and territorial health departments and laboratories to federal efforts to reduce foodborne infections.

Brief Summary:
An estimated 1 million Salmonella and 845,000 Campylobacter illnesses attributed to consumption of contaminated food occur annually in the United States. Determining the proportions of these attributed to specific food sources is essential to appropriately target interventions and monitor progress toward food safety goals. Surveillance data provided by local, state, and territorial health departments and laboratories, combined with a variety of analytical approaches, are needed to estimate the percentage of illnesses attributable to different sources. We frequently use two types of surveillance data—outbreak data and exposure data—to understand the epidemiology of Salmonella and Campylobacter infections and to estimate the sources of foodborne illness. Outbreak data reported by local, state, and territorial health departments to the National Outbreak Reporting System (NORS) often directly link illnesses with specific foods.  We recently used this data to develop a new approach to estimate the percentages of foodborne illnesses attributable to different food categories. In addition, exposure data collected by a survey of sporadic cases ascertained by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) are being used to develop a source attribution model for sporadic illnesses. Attribution estimates from both systems are being combined to provide population attributable fractions for Salmonella serotype Enteritidis illnesses attributable to shell eggs. Recent innovations in data collection and analysis in NORS and FoodNet highlight the importance of surveillance data collected by local, state, and territorial health departments and laboratories to determine the important sources of illness and inform food safety policy. During this roundtable session, we will provide examples of how the data states collect are being used to make risk-based decisions about food safety and to track progress toward goals. Increasingly, the data collected by different surveillance systems are being used to attribute both sporadic and outbreak-associated Salmonella and Campylobacter illnesses to specific sources. Surveillance data provided by local, state, and territorial health departments and laboratories are crucial to federal efforts to reduce infections and assess results of interventions.