Sharing Data
CDC made more of its information and data publicly available on the web. An example is the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, known as NARMS.
NARMS Now:Human Data
Using NARMS Now: Human Data, you can see how antibiotic resistance of four bacteria transmitted commonly through food has changed over the past two decades.
Visitors also can download preliminary surveillance data for isolates tested in the last 3 months, making the most recent data readily available.
FoodNet Tracks Increased use of Rapid Diagnostic Tests
The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) is tracking the use of rapid diagnostic tests (culture-independent diagnostic tests, or CIDTs) in 10 sites across the country – and showing the impact this has on our surveillance. The graphs below show how the use of CIDT is increasing over time for each pathogen.
Abbreviations: CIDT = culture-independent diagnostic test; FoodNet = CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network; STEC = Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli.
CDC continues to develop tools to meet the challenge of culture independent diagnostic tests, which do not yield the pathogen isolates critical for outbreak surveillance and investigation. In CDC labs, laboratory scientists and bioinformaticians are evaluating emerging direct-from-stool techniques that do not require culturing like targeted amplicon sequencing and metagenomics shotgun sequencing that could be used in the future for foodborne illness outbreak surveillance and subtyping.
In December 2017, FoodNet started a 2-year population survey to help U.S. public health experts better understand and prevent health issues related to foodborne illness.
Report on Foods Linked to Foodborne Illness
Each year in the United States an estimated 9 million people get sick, 56,000 are hospitalized, and 1,300 die of foodborne disease caused by known pathogens. These estimates help us understand the scope of this public health problem. However, to develop effective prevention measures, we need to understand the types of foods contributing to the problem Cdc-pdf[PDF – 14 pages]. In 2017, the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration (IFSAC) released a report that helps do that.