The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS), and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are working together to post foodborne illness outbreak data in an effort to improve outbreak investigation communications and transparency with the public. This collaboration addresses a goal in outbreak communications: sharing information quickly and accurately, even in the early stages of an outbreak investigation when significant details may be unknown. It gives consumers, food safety advocacy groups, and the food industry early awareness of developing multistate outbreaks.
FDA, CDC, and USDA-FSIS developed a coordinated approach through the efforts of the Interagency Foodborne Outbreak Response Collaboration (IFORC), a tri-agency collaboration chartered in 2013 to improve coordination of multistate outbreak investigations. IFORC develops and coordinates federal best practices for detection of foodborne outbreaks; generation and testing of hypotheses about outbreak causation, with input from industry partners; identification of food vehicles for outbreak-causing microbes; enhancement of data sharing and analyses; and development of interagency and public health communication strategies and processes. Each agency posts the data in slightly different though complementary formats.