Last week, the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration (IFSAC) released a report titled “Foodborne illness source attribution estimates for 2016 for Salmonella, Escherichia coli O157, Listeria monocytogenes, and Campylobacter using multi-year outbreak surveillance data, United States.” The authors used outbreak data to produce new estimates for foods responsible for foodborne illnesses caused by four pathogens in 2016. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, together, these four pathogens cause 1.9 million foodborne illnesses in the United States each year.
The analysis uses a method developed by IFSAC to estimate foodborne illness source attribution, which is the process of estimating the degree to which specific foods and food categories are responsible for foodborne illnesses. In addition to the 2016 estimates, IFSAC posted estimates for 2014 and 2015 on its website, reflecting IFSAC’s goal to provide annual updates of these estimates using data from the most recently available outbreak data.