What Are Environmental Assessments?

Environmental assessments are an important part of outbreak investigations. Food safety programs can use environmental assessments to respond to outbreaks of foodborne illness and make recommendations to prevent them in the future.

An environmental assessment of an outbreak determines how and why germs got into the environment and spread to make people sick. Food safety program officials typically conduct these assessments by

• Looking for clues in the food safety system to understand and address the outbreak’s environmental causes. These causes are also known as contributing factors and environmental antecedents.
• Involving people from different disciplines like epidemiology and laboratory to assess all aspects of the food safety system.
• Broadly defining the environment to include everything external to the host. For example, this definition includes air, food, water, animals, plants, and climate, as well as people and the social and built environments.

Foodborne illness is a significant problem in the United States.

• More than half of all foodborne illness outbreaks pdf icon[PDF – 1.91 MB] in the United States are associated with restaurants, delis, banquet facilities, schools, and other institutions.
• CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.
• Many of these illnesses occur as part of a foodborne illness outbreak; 841 foodborne illness outbreaks were reported to CDC in 2017. pdf icon[PDF – 1.91 MB]