Environmental Assessment Definitions

Review definitions of key terms used in environmental assessments of foodborne outbreak investigations reported in NEARS.

Contributing Factors – What happened to cause an outbreak; how an outbreak happens. Learn more about contributing factors.

Environment – Everything external to the host, including food, water, other people, and the built environment. For example,

• food, such as acidity, pH, and other factors that can affect survival and growth of pathogens;
• water, such as contaminated ice;
• other people, such as a worker who handles food while sick; and
• built environments, such as how a restaurant kitchen is designed.

Environmental Antecedents – Why contributing factors occur (sometimes referred to as root causes of outbreaks).

For example, a norovirus outbreak might have a primary contributing factor of a sick food worker. Environmental antecedents to this outbreak would focus on why the worker was working while sick. Those reasons could include the following:

• The worker would not get paid if he didn’t work
• His manager made him work because she could not find anyone to work his shift instead

Foodborne Illness Outbreak – When two or more people get sick after eating the same food.

Food Safety System – Every step along the farm-to-fork continuum. Each step in the continuum is also its own food safety system. All food safety systems consist of the same components:

• Inputs: items that enter the system (for example, ingredients received by restaurant kitchen)
• Processes: what inputs are subjected to (for example, serving, assembling, holding food)
• Internal system variables: factors that exert positive, negative, and neutral effects on all other aspects of the system
• Outputs: immediate results of the system
• Outcomes: what happens because of the outputs
• Feedback: to that system based on the outcomes

Interventions (science-based) – Actions taken to stop the outbreak and prevent future ones; recommendations based on data from environmental assessments and other components of the outbreak investigation. For example, immediate interventions might include the following:

• destroying food or taking steps to stop its distribution,
• excluding food workers who are sick, or
• closing the facility.

Longer term interventions might include the following:

• developing and implementing a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan or
• updating and implementing policies for identifying and managing food workers who are sick with symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, and/or fever.

System theory – Focusing on the complete system and the underlying interactions of all the forces that make up that system. Learn more about system theory in food safety.