This session will present methods and preliminary results from a number of joint federal efforts to estimate the number of foodborne illnesses attributable to different food commodities for four priority foodborne pathogens in the United States. In 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) formed the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration (IFSAC) to serve as an analytic hub for source attribution work of high priority to all three agencies. IFSAC projects are developing novel approaches to move forward the state of the science of source attribution, and results will be used to inform FDA and FSIS regulatory and management activities including priority setting, program evaluation, and targeted risk management. We propose talks focusing on the methods, data, and preliminary results of three ongoing IFSAC projects: (1) development of a multi-agency food classification scheme to improve the quality of data from nationally reported foodborne disease outbreaks that are used to estimate attribution, (2) analysis of foodborne outbreak data as representative of sporadic illness data for purposes of foodborne illness source attribution, and (3) a method of combining source attribution estimates obtained from studies of sporadic illness with data from foodborne outbreaks to estimate the proportion of Salmonella Enteritidis illnesses caused by major food commodities.

Presentations