FDA, FSIS, CDC Public Workshop to Discuss Metrics for Progress in Food Safety

February 26, 2010

The Federal Government and the food industry are pursuing major new efforts to reduce foodborne illness that include science-based preventive controls in food production and processing. As recommended by the President’s Food Safety Working Group, one element of the Federal Government’s food-safety initiatives includes regularly assessing performance metrics for measuring progress in reducing foodborne illness. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) are collaborating to address the methodological and data challenges involved in the development of feasible and effective food-safety metrics.

The agencies will engage the food-safety expert and stakeholder communities to discuss this subject through a series of public workshops. The first workshop, which will be held March 30, 2010, in Washington, D.C., is called Measuring Progress on Food Safety: Current Status and Future Directions.

The purpose of the workshop is to discuss current and potential measurements for assessing progress in food safety and to provide workshop participants an opportunity to learn about metrics and to consider and suggest metrics for assessing the effects that policies and interventions have on foodborne illness. FDA and FSIS base decisions about policies and other interventions related to food safety, in part, on CDC’s analyses of data on foodborne illness.

The workshop will focus on the current status and challenges involved in measuring foodborne illness and trends over time, including incidence and trends in the overall burden of foodborne illness and illnesses associated with specific foodborne pathogens and specific pathogens that affect specific foods. The workshop will include a discussion of other measures that are, or could be, used to measure food-safety progress that cannot be directly linked to health outcomes.

• Pre-registration deadline: March 24, 2010