State and local reporting of foodborne illnesses is the first line of defense against national outbreaks. Yet a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest finds that almost half of states do a poor job of tracking outbreaks -- and suggests passing legislation to reform the Food and Drug Administration will help.
A vital piece of the nation's food safety system is broken, says Caroline Smith DeWaal, the center's food safety director. She will present her findings at a U.S. Department of Agriculture-sponsored Food Safety Education Conference in Atlanta today.
Twenty-three states reported no more than three foodborne illnesses per million residents in 2007. Of those, 12 reported just one. That's compared with nine states with strong public health surveillance that reported 10 or more per million the same year. The data come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Tracking the number of reported illnesses is a good measure of a state's investment in public health surveillance, says Craig Hedberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota.
It helped pick up recent outbreaks linked to spinach, peanut butter and hot peppers and is "key to figuring out the causes of big, multistate outbreaks," he says.
Smith DeWaal says, "Outbreaks are what identify contaminated food products in the market so that they can be removed or recalled before they make other people sick."
The Food Safety Modernization Act, scheduled to go before the Senate in April, would require FDA to coordinate federal, state and local surveillance systems, Smith DeWaal says.
"More than 350,000 Americans are hospitalized each year and 5,000 die from preventable foodborne illness," says Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who wrote the act. "We need to strengthen the state-federal partnership as we work to strengthen the nation's food safety laws."
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