title: Attributing illness to food.
abstract: Identification and prioritization of effective food safety interventions require an understanding of the relationship between food and pathogen from farm to consumption. Critical to this cause is food attribution, the capacity to attribute cases of foodborne disease to the food vehicle or other source responsible for illness. A wide variety of food attribution approaches and data are used around the world, including the analysis of outbreak data, case-control studies, microbial subtyping and source tracking methods, and expert judgment, among others. The Food Safety Research Consortium sponsored the Food Attribution Data Workshop in October 2003 to discuss the virtues and limitations of these approaches and to identify future options for collecting food attribution data in the United States. We summarize workshop discussions and identify challenges that affect progress in this critical component of a risk-based approach to improving food safety.
authors: Resources for the Future, Washington, DC 20036-1434, USA. mbatz@rff.org
authors: Michael B
authors: MB
authors: Batz
authors: Michael P
authors: MP
authors: Doyle
authors: Glenn
authors: G
authors: Morris
authors: John
authors: J
authors: Painter
authors: Ruby
authors: R
authors: Singh
authors: Robert V
authors: RV
authors: Tauxe
authors: Michael R
authors: MR
authors: Taylor
authors: Danilo M A
authors: DM
authors: Lo Fo Wong
mesh_terms: D002487:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S.; D003718:Denmark / Q000453:epidemiology; D004196:Disease Outbreaks; D005506:Food Contamination; D006801:Humans; D011159:Population Surveillance; D018570:Risk Assessment; D006113:United Kingdom / Q000453:epidemiology; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology