When a foodborne illness outbreak is detected, public health and regulatory officials work together to determine what caused the outbreak and then take actions to avert additional illnesses from happening.1,2 During outbreak investigations, public health and regulatory authorities collect three types of data to determine a common food consumed by ill people: epidemiologic, traceback, and laboratory.
State and local partners, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), identify outbreaks and the foods that may be causing the illnesses through public health surveillance and epidemiologic evidence. State and local partners work with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct traceback investigations and examine the food supply chain to determine the origin of the foods identified by the epidemiologic investigations.3 State and local authorities, in partnership with FDA, may use product and environmental sampling, followed by laboratory analyses, to further confirm the identified food as the outbreak source.