CDC Report Highlights State Food Safety Practices

Explore your state’s status and our food safety resources.

Photo: Close up of gloved hands making a salad.

CDC’s Prevention Status Reports (PSRs) reports highlight—for all 50 states and the District of Columbia—the status of public health policies and practices designed to impact 10 important public health issues, including food safety. Each state is rated green, yellow, or red to reflect how well it is implementing the following food safety policies or practices:

Increasing the speed of DNA fingerprinting using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) testing for all reported cases of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157,
Increasing the completeness of PFGE testing of Salmonella, and
Adopting provisions recommended in the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Food Code into state food safety regulations.

New Food Indicator

We encourage you to and would especially like to draw your attention to a new food safety indicator. The indicator measures “state adoption of selected foodborne disease-related provisions” from the 2013 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Code. The Food Code is a science-based model code states can use to develop or update their food safety rules to better prevent illness and outbreaks. The measure covers the following Food Code provisions CDC has identified as especially important in reducing norovirus and other causes of illness in restaurants and other retail food establishments:

Excluding ill food service staff from working until at least 24 hours after symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea have ended.
Prohibiting bare hand contact with ready-to-eat food.
Requiring at least one employee in a food service establishment to be a certified food protection manager.
Requiring food service employees to wash their hands.

We are pleased that our Environmental Health Specialists Network (EHS-Net) contributed to understanding the importance of the above practices. EHS-Net is a forum of environmental health specialists working with epidemiologists and laboratorians providing practice-based research and recommendations to help health departments and the food industry reduce risk for outbreaks. Read our column in the Journal of Environmental Health, Improving Food Safety Through Prevention: CDC’s Food Safety Prevention Status Report [PDF – 388 KB].pdf icon

Explore your state’s status and check out our additional food safety resources below.