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.1 However, to develop effective prevention-oriented measures, we need to understand the percentage of foodborne illnesses associated with specific foods; we call this work foodborne illness source attribution.
With the creation of the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration (IFSAC) in 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS) agreed to improve data and methods used to estimate foodborne illness source attribution and provide timely estimates of the food sources of four priority foodborne pathogens: Salmonella, Escherichia coli O157, Listeria monocytogenes, and Campylobacter. In this report, we use the term Listeria to refer to Listeria monocytogenes. IFSAC considers these priority pathogens because of the frequency (estimated 1.9 million illnesses each year combined) and severity of illness they cause, and because targeted interventions can significantly reduce these illnesses.
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