Days ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its most recent yearly summary of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States. The summary covered the year 2013, and it found that 818 foodborne outbreaks were reported in the country during that year — a number consistent
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Industry Consortium Begins Enormous DNA Sequencing Project for Food Safety
Mars Inc. and IBM Research have teamed up for an ambitious food safety whole-genome sequencing project. The Consortium for Sequencing the Food Supply Chain will study the the microbial ecology of foods and their processing environments. Having a much deeper understanding of the populations in these ecologies — bacteria, fungi,
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Whole-Genome Technology Solving More Outbreak Investigations
A common disclaimer supplied by public health officials while in the midst of a foodborne illness outbreak investigation goes something like this: “We’re doing our best to find the food source of the outbreak, but it’s important to remember that the majority of outbreaks are never traced back to a
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How Culture-Independent Diagnostics Threaten Public Health Surveillance
Traditional methods for diagnosing foodborne illness infections such as Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli involve cultivating patient samples in an artificial nutrient medium. But tests that don’t require isolates from pure culture are becoming increasingly popular. There are different kinds of culture-independent diagnostic tests (CIDTs), but the type of that
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Publisher’s Platform: Will Whole Genome Sequencing Solve More Outbreaks?
“No illnesses have been reported to date.” How many times have we read a food recall notice posted on either the FDA or FSIS websites and written by the companies recalling the product who use that self-serving statement? I would say most of the time. In the past few months
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IAFP Interview: Wiedmann on Big Data in Food Safety
Dr. Martin Wiedmann, professor of food science at Cornell University, spoke with Food Safety News at the 2014 Conference of the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) held Aug. 3-6 in Indianapolis, IN.
The discussion covered advancements in the field of whole genome sequencing, a technology expected to significantly improve
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Global Microbe Genome Database Represents ‘Some Exciting Science’
If the world’s food safety scientists act now, they have the opportunity to create a global network of microbial data that will dramatically improve the ability to track and combat disease outbreaks of all sorts, including foodborne illness outbreaks, significantly tackling the spread of disease worldwide. That was the argument
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Whole-Genome Sequencing Expected to Revolutionize Outbreak Investigations
For decades, food safety experts have lived with the reality that roughly one-third of foodborne illness outbreak investigations ended without finding the source. But with the wide proliferation of new laboratory technology on the horizon, outbreak investigations could soon become more accurate, more efficient and more complete, according to researchers
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