The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has a longstanding commitment to strengthening food safety and better protecting consumers, as part of its public health agenda. The FDA is releasing the Foodborne Outbreak Response Improvement Plan.
This plan is designed to help the FDA and their partners enhance the speed, effectiveness, coordination and communication of foodborne outbreak investigations. They are confident that the actions outlined in this plan will in turn translate into activities focused on enhancing the prevention of outbreaks.
As part of implementing the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and the New Era of Smarter Food Safety initiative, the FDA has collaborated with experts in both the public and private sectors for input on additional ways to strengthen the agency’s outbreak response. Input from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state health officials, industry and consumer foodborne outbreak experts, along with the input of FDA leadership and staff, was key to the development of the new improvement plan.
The Foodborne Outbreak Response Improvement Plan focuses on four specific priority areas in which improvements will have the most impact on outbreaks associated with human food.
1. Tech-enabled product traceback – Engaging smarter ways to digitize and routinely receive information needed to streamline the traceback process, which are the steps used to pinpoint the source of contaminated foods during investigations. These tactics include obtaining more complete voluntarily provided consumer purchase data to better specify critical traceback information, facilitating and expediting how the FDA receives data, and employing more advanced analytical methods and computational approaches. The FDA will work to harmonize their efforts with their federal, state, local and territorial counterparts, as well with industry and others involved in traceback investigations.
2. Root-cause investigations (RCIs) – Systematizing, expediting and sharing FDA RCIs. The plan focuses on adapting and strengthening protocols and procedures for conducting timely RCIs of foodborne illness outbreaks, standardizing criteria for producing FDA RCI reports, and expediting the release of investigation findings to industry and the public.
3. Strengthen analysis and dissemination of outbreak data – Working with the CDC, the USDA’s FSIS and other partners to identify reoccurring, emerging and persistent strains of pathogens. Specifically, we will facilitate improvements to sharing of data with the CDC as well as other regulatory partners to further increase transparency of outbreak investigations, increase public confidence in results, and facilitate improved collaboration on investigation activities.
4. Operational improvements – Building on performance measures across the FDA’s foods program to better evaluate the timeliness and effectiveness of outbreak and regulatory investigation activities.
The 21st century has brought new challenges in identifying, investigating and controlling outbreaks of foodborne disease, but it has also brought new tools to meet those challenges.
