Using Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (Foodnet) to Estimate the National Burden of Specific Foodborne Illnesses. T. J. Van Guilder, F. J. Angulo, and P. M. Griffin, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA; and the FoodNet Working Group
Historically, foodborne illness data has been collected through passive surveillance; such data represent only the tip of the iceberg, however. For a bacterial infection to be included in the passive surveillance system, it must pass through all the following steps: a person becomes ill with a diarrheal disease and visits a doctor who must order a bacterial stool culture; the assigned microbiology laboratory must culture for the appropriate organism and report the infection to the state health department, and the state health department must report the infection to CDC. FoodNet, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), is a collaborative project of CDC, the eight Emerging Infections Program sites, USDA, and FDA, collects information about each of these steps in a variety of ways including population-based active surveillance based on reviews of logs at clinical laboratories, surveys of clinical laboratory practices, physicians’ practices, and of illnesses and practices in the general population. In addition, case-control studies to determine specific risk factors are undertaken. These surveys and studies yield more accurate information about the burden and causes of foodborne illness. FoodNet data is used to monitor trends in foodborne illness, to identify risk factors for foodborne infections in the general population, and to produce national estimates of the burden of diarrheal illness and of specific foodborne illnesses. This presentation will review the methods used and assumptions made in generating these estimates, using Salmonella and Campylobacter isolations as examples, and show the importance of more precise estimates of foodborne illnesses to risk assessment.
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