There’s a Major Foodborne Illness Outbreak and the Government’s Shut Down

[morningfog]

Late-breaking news, and I’ll update as I find out more: While the government is shut down, with food-safety personnel and disease detectives sent home and forbidden to work, a major foodborne-illness outbreak has begun. This evening, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture announced that “an estimated 278 illnesses … reported in 18 states” have been caused by chicken contaminated with Salmonella Heidelberg and possibly produced by the firm Foster Farms.

“FSIS is unable to link the illnesses to a specific product and a specific production period,” the agency said in an emailed alert. “The outbreak is continuing.”


This is the exact situation that CDC and other about-to-be-furloughed federal personnel warned about last week. As a reminder, a CDC staffer told me at the time:

I know that we will not be conducting multi-state outbreak investigations. States may continue to find outbreaks, but we won’t be doing the cross-state consultation and laboratory work to link outbreaks that might cross state borders.

That means that the lab work and molecular detection that can link far-apart cases and define the size and seriousness of outbreaks are not happening. At the CDC, which operates the national foodborne-detection services FoodNet and PulseNet, scientists couldn’t work on this if they wanted to; they have been locked out of their offices, lab and emails. (At a conference I attended last week, 10 percent of the speakers did not show up because they were CDC personnel and risked being fired if they traveled even voluntarily.)

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/shutdown-salmonella/

[BillyRibs]

1. NOOOO,

We Don't any Stupid regulation! The Invisible hand of the free market will keep things running. Yeah, RIGHT!

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

2. This isn't true

CDC Calls Back Staff to Handle Salmonella Outbreak

An outbreak of Salmonella Heidelberg has spread to 18 states and has sickened nearly 300, prompting the return of some 30 CDC staffers furloughed during the government shutdown to work on the case.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was the agency that sourced the outbreak to raw chicken products from three Foster Farms facilities in California, although there is no clear indication of which products specifically are affected or the time period in which these products were released, the agency said in a news brief.

The CDC, like many other government agencies, has been operating under "minimal support," and until Tuesday had only two of 80 foodborne pathogen-analyzing staff on duty, according to a report by ABC News.

But on Tuesday, “about 30 people working on foodborne analysis and outbreak response [were brought back to work], including bringing back about 10 people” who specialize in that area, the agency said in an email to MedPage Today.


http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/PublicHealth/42148