Purpose: Private market incentives for food safety are weak, because the causative pathogen and the food company are rarely linked to the 47.8 million U.S. acute foodborne illnesses each year. Similarly, regulatory programs at FDA and USDA link only an estimated 0.5% of acute foodborne illnesses to the food and its company. What actions by Federal regulators could strengthen the linkage and thereby strengthen the economic incentives for foodborne pathogen control?
Methods: Economic policy analysis evaluates the costs and public health benefits of options to limit the burden of disease due to foodborne pathogens in the U.S. marketplace, estimated at $78 billion annually by Robert Scharff. Advances in testing methods have created new faster, cheaper ways to identify specific pathogen serotypes and thus created new options for pathogen identification, linkage to companies, and control options.
Results: The building blocks of a Federal system to increase economic incentives and accountability for food companies to control foodborne pathogens are: 1) requiring pathogen tests from farm to fork, 2) requiring government access to all private pathogen test results (as a condition for selling food in the U.S. marketplace, 3) setting strict pathogen performance standards that require yearly improvement, 4) recording all legal liability cases and out-of-court settlements involving foodborne pathogens in a public database, 5) expanding epidemiologic research to identify and quantify acute human illnesses for CDC’s “unknown” foodborne pathogens (80% of illnesses) and the Long Term Health Outcomes of acute foodborne illnesses (acknowledged by CDC but not enumerated), and 6) creating an integrated nationwide database to link pathogens to specific food products and to the companies that supply these contaminated foods.
Significance: Creation and enforcement of this six step Federal program will give food companies stronger economic incentives to control pathogens and will level the playing field. Currently, bad-actor companies who cause foodborne illness are given a “free ride” as these companies are not held accountable for damage they inflict on U.S. consumers. This “free ride” hurts good-actor companies that do invest in superior pathogen control. Finally, the costs of implementing these six steps are much less than the estimated $78 billion annual U.S. public health burden due to foodborne pathogens causing both acute and Long Term Health Outcomes.