Attributing Illness to Food

TLDR

Understanding the link between food and pathogens from farm to consumption is essential for prioritizing effective food safety interventions, and food attribution—attributing disease cases to specific food vehicles—is critical for this purpose, with diverse approaches such as outbreak data, case-control studies, microbial subtyping, source tracking, and expert judgment used worldwide. The Food Safety Research Consortium convened the Food Attribution Data Workshop in October 2003 to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of existing food attribution methods and to outline future data collection strategies for the United States. The workshop brought together experts to review current food attribution techniques and to propose new data collection approaches. Workshop participants highlighted challenges that hinder progress in food attribution, including data gaps, methodological limitations, and the need for improved integration into risk‑based food safety strategies.

Abstract

Identification and prioritization of effective food safety interventions require an understanding of the relationship between food and pathogen from farm to consumption. Critical to this cause is food attribution, the capacity to attribute cases of foodborne disease to the food vehicle or other source responsible for illness. A wide variety of food attribution approaches and data are used around the world, including the analysis of outbreak data, case-control studies, microbial subtyping and source tracking methods, and expert judgment, among others. The Food Safety Research Consortium sponsored the Food Attribution Data Workshop in October 2003 to discuss the virtues and limitations of these approaches and to identify future options for collecting food attribution data in the United States. We summarize workshop discussions and identify challenges that affect progress in this critical component of a risk-based approach to improving food safety.