The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly and drastically scaled back the country’s most comprehensive system for tracking the food-borne illnesses estimated to sicken millions of Americans each year.
Public health experts consider the program, called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (or FoodNet), to be one of the most critical ways to protect against the dangerous pathogens, such as listeria and vibrio, that cause food-borne illnesses. For years, it tracked eight of them. As of this summer, it will only track two.
The sprawling effort involves three federal agencies and 10 state governments, which work together to root out food-borne illnesses early and study their origins. The government has other systems for tracking pathogens, meaning people will likely continue to learn about outbreaks. But public health experts said they worried that scaling back FoodNet could present long-term health risks.
“You will clearly miss cases,” said Dr. Glenn Morris, a physician and epidemiologist in Florida who helped establish FoodNet at the Department of Agriculture.
A C.D.C. spokeswoman said that the department had determined that some of the program’s processes were “duplicative,” namely that other C.D.C. programs also track food-borne illnesses. She also noted that the two pathogens FoodNet would continue to monitor — salmonella and a strain of E. coli commonly referred to as STEC — are among the country’s top contributors to food-borne illness, hospitalization and death.
But other programs are less thorough than FoodNet, and the pathogens cut from the program are also dangerous. Two of them, campylobacter and listeria, killed a total of 72 people in 2022, and made thousands sick, according to FoodNet data. The others are cyclospora, shigella, vibrio and yersinia.
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The post Cuts to the Food Safety System Threaten Americans’ Health appeared first on New York Times.
