How Changes in Foodborne Illness Tracking Could Impact Fresh Produce

Article By Christina Herrick Published September 9, 2025
Article Source: https://www.thepacker.com/news/food-safety/how-changes-foodborne-illness-tracking-could-impact-fresh-produce

With the CDC reducing the number of foodborne pathogens it actively tracks from eight to two, Frank Yiannas, former FDA deputy commissioner, says there’s a lot at risk.

Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced the required surveillance in its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet). The CDC works with the Food and Drug Administration and USDA, as well as select state health departments, to track foodborne illnesses.

Frank Yiannas, former FDA deputy commissioner, says that these cuts, which reduce the number of illnesses tracked from campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), shigella, vibrio and yersinia to only STEC and salmonella, could have lasting effects on the fresh produce industry.

With FoodNet, the CDC checks in with laboratories in select areas weekly. These laboratories in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee and select counties in California and New York equate to about 16% of the population. From there, FoodNet tracks the incidents of foodborne illness per 100,000 people, which Yiannas says helps stabilize the data, because FoodNet tracks the rates of incidents as they happen.

This active surveillance is different than passive reporting, where health departments and the CDC report foodborne illnesses, Yiannas explains. Oftentimes, passive reporting can lead to underreporting of foodborne illnesses due to delays in processing.

“Without this kind of work, we really don’t know what the incidence of foodborne disease is,” he says. “You don’t want to just count cases of foodborne disease. You don’t want to count outbreaks of foodborne disease. You want an incidence per 100,000 population, because then you have a rate that you can compare to year after year.”

But with the cuts, the CDC will now only track salmonella and STEC.

“That means, going forward, the only thing we’ll have good data on in terms of what the true incidence of these pathogens in our country will be salmonella and STEC,” Yiannas says. “The industry won’t really know long-term trends on whether these pathogens are increasing or the illnesses are decreasing. No. 1, it’ll be hard for us to know whether we’re making progress. It’s the ultimate measuring stick, if you will. We won’t know whether we’re making progress. We won’t know whether our food system is getting safer or less safe because of climate change, because of imports or because of rules. We won’t be able to rate whether our interventions or rules are working or not, because we just won’t have confidence in the numbers.”

He says these cuts directly conflict with both the interest in the “gold standard” of science as well as a desire for radical transparency.

“I can’t imagine you’d find an epidemiologist who would say passive surveillance is the gold standard,” he says.

And Yiannas says this is a shame, because he thinks the U.S. has built one of the best foodborne surveillance systems thanks to the use of whole genome sequencing.

“I’ve worked with other nations, and our ability to do surveillance and detect cases of foodborne illness is really, really good, and that was largely because of the CDC and the states in programs such as FoodNet and technologies just such as whole genome sequencing,” he says. “The thing that has advanced food safety the most into the 21st century is foodborne disease surveillance; the fact that we can detect foodborne illnesses sometimes makes the invisible visible.”

And this also comes at a time when he says the food industry has not bent the curve of foodborne illness in two decades. Some of that, he says, can be attributed to the challenges of those last-mile issues of tracing the foodborne illness all the way back to the producer.

“When you start fighting these battles, it’s kind of like you pick the low-hanging fruit off the tree, and now the fruit is a little bit higher up, and it’s harder to reach,” he says. “So, these last-mile problems that we’re battling, these are harder.”

It’s likely that there will be less reporting of smaller foodborne illness cases, only outbreaks, Yiannas says. With these cuts, it will set up a system only able to detect larger outbreaks.

“You want to find out the spread in low-number cases too, to see what you can learn about them and to prevent a big outbreak,” he says. “I use the analogy of the airplane industry of near misses. You want everything to be investigated. You don’t want to wait until there’s a catastrophic failure in a big airplane.”

And from here, he says he hopes that the private sector will step in and help fill the place of FoodNet’s reduced reporting. But, he adds, the important thing to remember is this is not a partisan issue; this is an issue that impacts all Americans.

“The reality is this is a public sector function, because the industry can’t do this,” he says of FoodNet. “We do expect our government to do basic things that keep the American people safe. Maintaining the safety of the American consumer is a government responsibility and clearly a private sector responsibility, but foodborne illness surveillance is a public sector responsibility.”

And for those concerned about the impacts of these cuts, Yiannas encourages the industry to contact their representatives and legislators, as well as the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Advocate with political leaders ... about the concern that what we’ll know about foodborne illnesses — other than the two that they’re tracking aggressively — will be less than what we’ve known for decades past, and we won’t really know whether our food system is getting safer,” he says.