Blog

FDA Releases Plan to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response

The FDA, as part of its new era of smarter food safety, has released its Foodborne Outbreak Response Improvement Plan (FORIP). They seek to enhance the speed, effectiveness, coordination, and communication of outbreak investigations.

In the United States, tracking foodborne illness outbreaks involves many different states and jurisdictions. With the FORIP, the FDA hopes to make this process even more efficient to prevent the outbreak from spreading further and to prevent similar outbreaks from happening in the future.

FORIP focuses on four different areas:

•          Tech-enabled product traceback—Digitizing the traceback process
•          Root cause investigations—Conducting timely root cause investigations and expediting the process of getting any necessary public health information out there to prevent the situation from happening again
•          Analysis and dissemination of outbreak data—Strengthening analysis of outbreak data and sharing this with other regulatory partners
•          Operational improvements—Improving operations for root cause investigations, product tracing, and distribution of outbreak data

With these improvements, the FDA will be better equipped to respond to foodborne outbreaks, helping to prevent future foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States

For more information and specifics on this new plan, read about it on the FDA’s Website.