Attributing Illness to Food

摘要

Identification and prioritization of effective food safetyinterventions require an understanding of the relationshipbetween food and pathogen from farm to consumption.Critical to this cause is food attribution, the capacity toattribute cases of foodborne disease to the food vehicle orother source responsible for illness. A wide variety of foodattribution approaches and data are used around the world,including the analysis of outbreak data, case-control stud-ies, microbial subtyping and source tracking methods, andexpert judgment, among others. The Food SafetyResearch Consortium sponsored the Food Attribution DataWorkshop in October 2003 to discuss the virtues and limi-tations of these approaches and to identify future optionsfor collecting food attribution data in the United States. Wesummarize workshop discussions and identify challengesthat affect progress in this critical component of a risk-based approach to improving food safety