A major challenge for a risk-based food safety system is attributing to food sources the number of illnesses due to major foodborne pathogens like Salmonella, E. coli  O157:H7, Campylobacter, and Listeria monocytogenes. Such attribution estimates are necessary to understand the burden of foodborne disease and provide critical information for risk-informed priority setting, program evaluation, and targeted risk management. Foodborne illness source attribution remains an area of active research, as scientists throughout the world continue to develop novel approaches, advance existing methods, and bring new data to bear on these questions.

This symposium will present six new studies underway or nearing completion. In a major effort, the Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG) of the World Health Organization (WHO) has developed an expert elicitation for food source attribution to estimate the global burden of foodborne disease. Modeling efforts built on microbial fingerprinting continue to evolve rapidly; this symposium will include presentations on two novel microbial subtyping studies, one based on whole genome sequencing and another by FoodNet Canada using comparative genomics. The Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration (IFSAC) – comprising joint efforts of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) – has developed a new approach for estimating outbreak-based attribution based on a two-stage statistical model, and has critically assessed uncertainties associated with outbreak-based attribution estimates. IFSAC scientists have also advanced the U.S. version of the Hald model, a Bayesian frequency-matching model for attributing Salmonella serotypes across FSIS and FDA product categories.

Presentations