A recent study conducted by the Colorado School of Public health suggests that investment in public health programs can help prevent the spread of foodborne illness through increased outbreak reporting. The study, published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, evaluated the structural and outbreak factors associated with reporting foodborne illness outbreaks. The findings revealed substantial variation across states in the amount and types of outbreaks reported, with funding for infectious disease programs being a large factor in the difference between “high” and “low” reporting states.
Using outbreak surveillance data from CDC’s Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System for 2009–2018, researchers categorized the 50 states and Washington D.C. as having “high,” “middle,” and “low” levels of outbreak reporting based on the number of reported outbreaks per 10 million people. The researchers excluded multistate outbreaks from their analysis, and focused on outbreaks linked to Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157:H7, norovirus, and bacterial toxins.