II. IFSAC Activities and Analytic Approaches

IFSAC Updates and Progress on Assigning Point of Contamination

The Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration, established in 2011, coordinates efforts by CDC, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA/FSIS) to identify, plan, and conduct selected food safety and foodborne illness analytic projects and improve coordination of federal food safety analytic efforts. Some of IFSAC’s accomplishments in 2018 included a publicationexternal icon on the updated scheme for categorizing foods implicated in foodborne disease outbreaks; an annual report on foodborne illness source attribution estimates for four priority pathogens: Salmonella, E. coli O157, Listeria monocytogenes, and Campylobacter; and informing partners of IFSAC work at national and international conferences.

One of IFSAC’s current projects is the Point of Contamination (POC) project, which evaluates CDC, FDA, and FSIS datasets’ utility in assessing points of contamination in foodborne disease outbreaks. The project resulted in the development of a method that utilizes multiple Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System (FDOSS) variables to classify outbreaks based on the regulatory jurisdiction under which contamination likely occurred, which may help break down and group certain points in the supply chain, such as retail versus manufacturing. The jurisdiction-based approach is now automated: 80% of outbreaks reported during a 16-year period can be auto-classified based on the regulatory jurisdiction (the remaining 20% require manual review). The next steps in the POC project include focusing on manually reviewing unassignable outbreaks and summarizing findings.