BACKGROUND: In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service teamed up to create the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration (IFSAC). The goal of this collaboration is to improve coordination of federal food safety analytic efforts and address cross-cutting priorities for food safety data collection, analysis, and use.
METHODS: In the past five years, IFSAC participants from each agency have collaborated on twelve analytics projects with a focus in better understanding foodborne illness attribution in the United States.
RESULTS: A new food categorization scheme was developed by IFSAC to increase the accuracy and utility of food categories used to generate foodborne illness source attribution estimates used by federal agencies and to provide more specific assignments of food vehicles to food categories. In addition, several analytical projects were completed that addressed attribution. One compared the characteristics of outbreak associated foodborne illnesses with those that are not linked to outbreaks. Another project focused on developing harmonized foodborne illness source attribution estimates from outbreak data for select pathogens using a two-step modeling approach. IFSAC also applied other attribution models using product contamination data or case-patient food exposure data to better account for sporadic illnesses and measures of uncertainty.
CONCLUSIONS: IFSAC is an ongoing collaboration and is currently addressing other issues in food safety analytics such as evaluating foodborne illness attribution over time in different categories, assessing point of contamination attribution in the supply chain for foodborne illness, and incorporating data from multiple-ingredient foods into current estimates. This presentation will detail ongoing IFSAC progress, highlight past accomplishments, and explore future research. It will also highlight where state and local epidemiologists and health departments are vital contributors to this effort.