Sunday, July 26, 2015: 4:00 PM
Oregon Ballroom 201 (Oregon Convention Center)
Production, processing and distribution of food is complex, multifactorial, and global in scope. Food safety risks introduced by a single producer can result in multiple deleterious outcomes downstream. Food regulatory bodies including FDA seek to reduce foodborne illness associated with a stunning variety of domestic and imported foods, but lack resources to comprehensively evaluate production conditions and risks. Surveillance for foodborne indicators and pathogens is commonly used to monitor the effectiveness of food safety interventions. Traditionally, microbiological assays provided qualitative (presence / absence) and quantitative (concentration) information about microbes in foods or the production environment. Typing assays can discriminate microorganisms to yield useful information about potential for virulence, resistance to antimicrobials, persistence, and other properties of interest. The recent availability of rapid and lower cost methods for whole genome sequencing have provided new opportunities for foodborne pathogen surveillance for food inspection as well as manufacturers. WGS data can detect small clusters with high confidence, sometimes with minimal traditional epidemiological inference, allowing smaller clusters to be detected, often before a majority of the cases are identified. These methods provide the opportunity to identify more outbreaks and take corrective actions much earlier. FDA is sponsoring GenomeTrakr, a pilot network consisting of regulatory, state, commercial, and international labs linked by a common publically accessible database, to evaluate the use of WGS data for food pathogen surveillance.