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.
“We’re really gutting one of the cornerstones of food safety,” said Elaine Scallan Walter, a professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health and one of the lead scientists for the FoodNet program in Colorado.
The cuts come as Americans are losing confidence in the safety of the U.S. food supply. One survey this year of 3,000 Americans found that only around half of people were “very confident” or “somewhat confident” in the safety of the food supply, down from roughly three-fourths in 2012.
The change shifts the burden onto already “freaked out” consumers, said Nancy Glick, the director of food and nutrition policy at the National Consumers League, an advocacy organization.
People can be hypervigilant about cooking their food thoroughly and washing their hands and countertops to reduce the risk of infection, but these measures can only go so far, Ms. Glick said, adding that the government should be investing in food safety, not cutting back.
“I’m really worried,” said Barbara Kowalcyk, an associate professor of food safety and public health at George Washington University, whose 2-year-old son died of an STEC infection. “You can’t find things unless you look for them.”
What is FoodNet?
The program was launched in 1995, following an E. coli outbreak linked to contaminated meat at Jack in the Box restaurants, which sickened hundreds and killed four children.
The idea was to monitor the burden of food-borne illness in a wide swath of the country that closely mirror national demographics, Dr. Kowalcyk said. Today, the program operates in 10 states: Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, California and New York.
The states’ public health departments work with the C.D.C., as well as the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S.D.A., to conduct surveys and studies and put out an annual food-borne illness “report card.”
These materials can reveal trends and sources of disease. Recently, for example, the report showed that cases of vibrio, a rare but serious illness associated with eating raw seafood, had more than doubled over 15 years. And in 2007, FoodNet surveys showed that melon could carry listeria. Four years later, the finding helped identify the source of a deadly outbreak.
Without FoodNet, public health officials and clinicians may not have known to ask sick people early on whether they’d eaten melon, Dr. Scallan Walter said. Contaminated melon could have been left on store shelves.
A proactive approach
The tracking of food-borne illness typically relies on people visiting their doctors when they become ill and doctors sending stool samples to laboratories for testing.
Once a sample tests positive for a pathogen that’s on a designated list, a lab worker must inform state or local health authorities, who must then report the case to the C.D.C. This is called passive surveillance, and the country’s other food-borne illness tracking systems, including the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System and a separate C.D.C. program dedicated to listeria, work this way.
It’s an imperfect process. Laboratory workers may not immediately know which pathogens to look out for or recognize that it’s their responsibility to quickly inform authorities. Most food-borne illnesses go unreported, said Matthew Moore, an associate professor in the department of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
FoodNet is distinctive in that it conducts active surveillance. Its employees don’t “just sit back and wait” for food-borne illness cases to be reported, Dr. Kowalcyk said.
Instead, they regularly connect with more than 700 laboratories across the 10 selected states to ask if they’ve seen positive cases of any of the pathogens the program tracks.
What happens now?
Moving forward, the program’s 10 state health departments are only required to report salmonella and STEC infections within FoodNet.
They can still collect data on the other six pathogens, but budget cuts could make doing so difficult. Most state and local public health programs are funded by the C.D.C., which is facing a proposed budget reduction of $3.5 billion next year. In the case of California, for example, the pathogens the state will track next year depends on the amount of funding it receives from the C.D.C., said a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Public Health.
“The public health system is getting dismantled,” Dr. Morris said. “Food-borne disease is one component of that.”
Caroline Hopkins Legaspi is a Times reporter focusing on nutrition and sleep.
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