ABSTRACT
The past decade has witnessed substantive advances in efforts to reduce the risk of foodborne disease. Driven in part by the Escherichia coli O157:H7 outbreaks that occurred in the western part of the United States in 1993 (U.S. CDC 1993; Bell 1994), there was strong public pressure to understand better the factors contributing to occurrence of foodborne illness and to develop regulatory strategies to minimize the risk of infection. These efforts led, in 1995, to implementation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Final Rule on Procedures for the Safe and Sanitary Processing and Importing of Fish and Fishery Products (“Seafood HACCP”)(CFSAN 1995), followed shortly by the Pathogen Reduction: Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) Systems; Final Rule for meat and poultry, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)(FSIS 1996). While serving as major milestones in moving toward a risk-based regulatory approach to food safety, these regulations also highlighted the existing deficiencies in data on frequency, routes of transmission, and economic impact of foodborne illness. This, in turn, led to creation of FoodNet, for collection of surveillance data on human foodborne disease; to an increasing commitment of funds by multiple agencies to food safety research; and to a renewed emphasis on accurately determining cost of illness, and the costs and benefits associated with regulatory interventions.
