FoodCORE: Helping Health Departments Catch Foodborne Outbreaks Faster

Every year in the United States, foodborne diseases make about 1 in 6 Americans (roughly 48 million people) sick, and cause 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. Fast, effective outbreak investigations are needed to find contaminated food, remove it from the market and learn how contamination happened so similar outbreaks can be prevented. But most health departments lack the resources for comprehensive surveillance of enteric diseases and rapid, coordinated outbreak response. FoodCORE — the Foodborne Diseases Centers for Outbreak Response Enhancement — is CDC's program to close that gap.

What FoodCORE does

FoodCORE centers in state and local health departments work together to develop and improve ways to detect, investigate, respond to and control multistate foodborne outbreaks. The focus is on bacterial outbreaks, including Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Listeria, while also strengthening the ability to detect and investigate viral and parasitic outbreaks.

With FoodCORE support, health departments can interview sick people sooner and more thoroughly about what they ate, subtype the bacteria that made them sick more quickly, and pool information swiftly to find the sources of contaminated food.

Priorities

FoodCORE provides targeted funding to:

• pay for laboratory, epidemiology and environmental health staff;
• build collaborative surveillance and response programs;
• carry out fast, coordinated, standardized investigations;
• develop and use performance metrics; and
• identify and document model practices others can copy.

Three disciplines, one team

Each center strengthens collaboration among three groups whose work is central to outbreak response:

• epidemiology, which learns what a sick person ate, drank and was exposed to;
• the laboratory, which determines which bacterium, virus or parasite caused the illness; and
• environmental health, which examines where contamination may have happened.

Working more closely, they can detect more outbreaks, investigate them thoroughly, control them faster, and protect others from getting sick.

Measuring results

FoodCORE centers developed and tested performance metrics for the burden, timeliness and completeness of their foodborne disease work, from surveillance and detection through investigation, response, control and prevention. They report data for Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Listeria, and separately for norovirus, other enteric pathogens and outbreaks of unknown cause, and the results are published online to show the impact of their changes. Centers share success stories, model practices and lessons learned online and at conferences.

Sources

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "About FoodCORE": https://www.cdc.gov/foodcore/php/about/index.html