The Wrong Way to Make Foodborne Illness Disappear

Foodborne illness causes untold suffering. Statistics capture only one part of the story of victims like April Bonham, who lost her baby to Listeria monocytogenes, or Mari Tardiff, who is struggling to walk again after Campylobacter landed her on a ventilator. But reliable statistics, and the foodborne illness surveillance systems that generate them, give us a critical tool in detecting outbreaks early, and preventing tragedy.

For many of us, tragic stories send us searching for ways to distinguish ourselves. And food safety is no different. "I would be more careful handling [fill in the blank]," you might say, or "We don't eat [blank] in my household," or even "My healthy microbiome protects me against infections."

A healthy microbiome helps, for sure, but let's not delude ourselves. With every bite, we roll the dice.

Despite the herculean efforts of corporate leaders, most Americans do not like to gamble, and certainly not when it comes to food safety. While the MAHA movement has attracted attention to Americans' dissatisfaction with the government's laissez-faire stance on sketchy chemicals in food, most of us would like to see more done to keep dangerous microbes out too. Recent polling found that 93% of Americans "believe the U.S. government's capacity for food safety inspections should be strengthened or maintained as is, with a vast majority favoring strengthening."

The Administration believes otherwise. Arguably the most influential policymaker in the Administration, OMB Director Russel Vought, wrote in Project 2025 that the President must act with "boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America's families, faith communities, local governments, and states." Indeed, the Administration has acted with unprecedented "boldness" in its first months, firing or eliciting the resignations of federal workers across the government, including hundreds if not thousands at federal food safety agencies.

What kind of food safety system can we expect such "boldness" to create? Project 2025 says little about food safety, other than endorsing proposals to give states more authority over meat and poultry inspection, which would require Congress to change the law. For its part, FDA has signaled its intent to shift more routine inspections to the states, plans that would likewise require Congress to appropriate funding to the states to take on these new workstreams. But some federal food safety functions are not well-suited to state (not to mention faith community) takeover.

One such function is disease surveillance. The federal government is uniquely suited to gather data from across the country to connect the dots in emerging outbreaks, and to measure progress towards reducing foodborne illness. Are we experiencing increases in illness due to unscrupulous food company executives feeling emboldened to cut corners, or to unwitting consumers following the lead of our Health and Human Services Secretary in drinking raw milk, or because of any number of other factors? The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) is indisputably best positioned to answer that question.

Yet last week, NBC News reported that CDC officials had "quietly scaled back" the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) program on July 1, dropping six of eight foodborne pathogens from the scope of its surveillance. Since 1995, FoodNet has offered the most accurate assessment of foodborne illness in the United States. Now, detecting an increase in infections from campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio or Yersinia will depend on inconsistent reporting from state health departments. And if "breaking the bureaucracy" leads to an increase in illness caused by these pathogens, we will be less likely to find out, at least right away.

In the words of Dr. Glenn Morris, a University of Florida epidemiologist who helped build FoodNet: "If you want to make foodborne disease go away, then don't look for foodborne disease. And then you can cheerfully eliminate all of your foodborne disease regulations."

But consumers beware: the cheer cannot last forever. At the state level, researchers have found that investing in public health programming correlates with more frequent reporting of foodborne illness clusters, but the clusters are smaller than those reported in states that underinvest in public health. In other words, the states that skimp on public health look safer, until so many people get sick they can no longer ignore it.

Fortunately, much of CDC's foodborne illness surveillance infrastructure remains intact, but that could change quickly as the Administration purges the federal workforce of dedicated experts and replaces them with loyalists. Congress needs to step up. It should eliminate any doubt that the Administration's recent termination of food safety inspectors' and other federal employees' union contracts is illegal. And it should give critical public health agencies the resources they need to do their job. Instead, yesterday the House Appropriations committee released a bill that would cut CDC funding by 19%. They say the cuts will "end the weaponization of government," but they run the risk of ending the era in which most of us take for granted the microbiological safety of our food.

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