Colorado most likely will have to cut back its in-depth surveillance for foodborne illnesses after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to use the program to look for only two types of bacteria.
FoodNet previously tracked cases and conducted research about eight types of bacteria and parasites commonly found in contaminated food: salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, listeria, cyclospora, shigella, vibrio and yersinia. They typically cause short-term gastrointestinal distress in healthy people, but are more dangerous to young children, older adults, pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems.
Now, FoodNet will only put resources toward salmonella and E. coli. The CDC didn’t respond to questions by deadline, but told other media outlets that FoodNet is duplicative because other systems exist to track foodborne illnesses.
Colorado is one of 10 states participating in FoodNet, with scientists at the state health department and the Colorado School of Public Health contributing. The others are California, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Tennessee.
The CDC’s cutback doesn’t forbid Colorado from tracking the other six illnesses, but the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has said budget constraints would likely make that unfeasible.
“All changes will be made in collaboration with CDC and the nine other FoodNet sites. While it is important for Colorado FoodNet to scale our activities in proportion to funding, we continue to prioritize activities that are essential to outbreak detection and response in order to protect the health of all Coloradans,” spokeswoman Kristin Richmann said in an email.
States conduct “passive surveillance” by requiring labs to report certain illnesses, including the eight on the list, said Elaine Scallan Walter, a professor at the School of Public Health and co-principal investigator for FoodNet in the state.
FoodNet takes a more active role, reaching out to labs and auditing their reporting compliance, so foodborne illnesses don’t slip through the cracks, she said.
“We’re going back to basics for (surveillance of) some of the pathogens,” she said.
FoodNet also has resources to survey doctors on how they treat patients who present with diarrhea and the general public about when they seek care, which allows it to extrapolate how many foodborne illnesses likely go undetected for every known case, Scallan Walter said.
They also survey people who got sick, and a control group who didn’t, about the foods they ate in the last 10 days. If 80% of people who developed a certain illness ate peanut butter, for example, knowing how many in the control group also ate peanut butter allows FoodNet to determine whether that signals a problem with one particular food, Scallan Walter said.
That kind of research identified melons as a potential source of listeria, allowing the CDC to trace a 2011 listeria outbreak to cantaloupe faster than it otherwise would have, she said.
“It gives us much more solid footing when we’re looking at trends,” she said.
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