Step-by-Step Guide to Investigating Foodborne Outbreaks
A foodborne outbreak investigation goes through several challenging steps. They are described here in order, but in reality, several steps may happen at the same time.
- Detecting a possible outbreak
- Defining and finding cases
- Generating hypotheses (educated guesses) about likely sources
- Testing the hypotheses
- Finding the point of contamination and source of the food
- Controlling an outbreak
- Deciding an outbreak is over
Figure 2: Steps in a Foodborne Outbreak Investigation. Click the image to get a larger view.
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