Recently, researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA’s ERS) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in collaboration with Iowa public health officials, developed a methodology that can be used to assess the value of state and federal foodborne illness outbreak investigations and subsequent recalls. The researchers demonstrated their model as replicable by employing it in a recent study that aimed to quantify the effect of public health actions of a 2018 foodborne Salmonella outbreak linked to prepackaged chicken salad.
Using their model, the researchers estimated that rapid response to the multistate foodborne outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium potentially avoided 94 reported cases and saved approximately $921,000 in medical costs and productivity losses. ERS has provided a visual chart depicting the modeling steps applied to the S. Typhimurium outbreak.