The recent confirmation of an outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter (Peter Pan and Great Value brands) demonstrates another weakness in U.S. disease surveillance. This CDC announcement details the process by which a food-borne disease outbreak is detected, confirmed, and tracked.
“PulseNet (the national subtyping network for foodborne disease surveillance coordinated by CDC) detected a slowly rising increase in cases of Salmonella Tennessee this fall. OutbreakNet (the national network of public health officials coordinated by CDC that investigates enteric disease outbreaks) then worked for several weeks to identify this unusual food vehicle. Public health officials from several states have isolated Salmonella from open jars of peanut butter of both Peter Pan and Great Value brand. For nine jars, the serotype has been confirmed as Tennessee and DNA fingerprinting has shown that the pattern is the outbreak strain.”
Yet as recently as February 16th, “ConAgra officials said they were unsure why the C.D.C. had identified peanut butter as the source of the problem. A spokesman for the company, Chris Kircher, said that tests of the peanut butter and factory were negative but that it closed the plant to investigate.”
Typical corporate evasion, but the bigger question is: if CDC was picking up cases of salmonella in the FALL, why did it take so long to identify the source? Check out these posts from the blog Effect Measure for more on how the FDA and the USDA are being criticized for poor food surveillance. Interestingly, the FDA briefly increased spending after 9/11 because of bioterrorism, but spending has not kept paced with rising personell costs and a massive shift towards imported food.
‘Responding to fears of a bioterrorist attack on the nation’s food supply, the FDA budget was increased after 9/11 and inspections increased. That was then. This is now:
“The only difference is now it’s worse, because there are more inspections to do — more facilities — and more food coming into America, which requires more inspections,” said Tommy Thompson, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services pushed to increase the numbers. He’s now part of a coalition lobbying to turn around several years of stagnant spending. The Bush administration’s budget request for 2008 includes an additional $10.6 million for food safety at the FDA; the lobbying group said 10 times that increase is needed. Even though the FDA increased its overall spending on food between 2003 and 2006, those increases failed to keep pace with rising personnel costs.”‘
An increase of $100 million for FDA? This could be interesting.
