This page is based on CDC's anniversary page for PulseNet.
PulseNet began in 1996. For 30 years it has strengthened U.S. food safety by connecting cases of foodborne illness to one another and detecting outbreaks.
- Every U.S. state has at least one laboratory that uses PulseNet technology.
- Those laboratories can search databases holding more than 1 million bacterial DNA fingerprints.
What it has achieved
CDC credits PulseNet with these results since its 1996 launch:
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Contaminated food recalled in the U.S. | over 1 billion pounds |
| Foodborne illnesses prevented each year, from the three most common causes — Salmonella, E. coli and Listeria | an estimated 270,000 |
| Medical costs and lost productivity saved each year | over $500 million |
PulseNet has also made several foods safer to eat, among them peanut butter, sprouts, leafy greens and melons. It has sped up outbreak detection considerably, helped by many partnerships within the country.
The almond outbreak
In the early 2000s PulseNet traced a Salmonella outbreak to raw almonds grown in California. In response, regulators required that almonds sold in the U.S. be pasteurized, by fumigation or hot steam, to prevent more outbreaks.
How it works now
CDC scientists, public health laboratories and clinicians together make sure the bacterial DNA fingerprints needed to spot outbreaks are collected and shared. PulseNet aims to stay at the front of changing diagnostic methods, and to find modern ways of linking systems and finding outbreaks that do not depend on older technology.
PulseNet continues to detect outbreaks with whole genome sequencing (WGS), which reads all of an organism's genetic material, its genome, in one efficient process. CDC and PulseNet are widening WGS use in state laboratories, and now use it to find foodborne outbreaks tied to Listeria, Campylobacter, E. coli and Salmonella.
What comes next
Culture-independent diagnostic tests (CIDTs) will let laboratories detect bacterial DNA fingerprints straight from patient samples, without first growing (culturing) the bacteria to identify them. Laboratories are using CIDTs more to save money and identify foodborne illness faster.
Sources
- CDC, "PulseNet: Today and Beyond": https://www.cdc.gov/pulsenet/php/anniversary/index.html
- The CDC page's graphics are not reproduced here. One of them states the yearly savings as "at least half a million dollars," while the page's text gives over $500 million; this page follows the text.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.cdc.gov
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