title: An Adjusted Likelihood Ratio Approach Analysing Distribution of Food Products to Assist the Investigation of Foodborne Outbreaks.
abstract: In order to facilitate foodborne outbreak investigations there is a need to improve the methods for identifying the food products that should be sampled for laboratory analysis. The aim of this study was to examine the applicability of a likelihood ratio approach previously developed on simulated data, to real outbreak data. We used human case and food product distribution data from the Norwegian enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli outbreak in 2006. The approach was adjusted to include time, space smoothing and to handle missing or misclassified information. The performance of the adjusted likelihood ratio approach on the data originating from the HUS outbreak and control data indicates that the adjusted approach is promising and indicates that the adjusted approach could be a useful tool to assist and facilitate the investigation of food borne outbreaks in the future if good traceability are available and implemented in the distribution chain. However, the approach needs to be further validated on other outbreak data and also including other food products than meat products in order to make a more general conclusion of the applicability of the developed approach.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Surveillance, Norwegian Veterinary Institute, Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Madelaine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Norström
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Surveillance, Norwegian Veterinary Institute, Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Anja Bråthen
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Kristoffersen
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Surveillance, Norwegian Veterinary Institute, Oslo, Norway; Technische Universität München, München, Germany.
authors.forename: Franziska Sophie
authors.initials: FS
authors.lastname: Görlach
authors.affiliation: Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Division of Infectious Disease Control, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Karin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nygård
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Surveillance, Norwegian Veterinary Institute, Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Petter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hopp
mesh_terms: D004196:Disease Outbreaks; D004927:Escherichia coli Infections / Q000453:epidemiology*; D005506:Food Contamination; D005517:Foodborne Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology*; D006801:Humans; D008461:Meat Products