[SOUND] [MUSIC] CDC is monitoring what happens out of PulseNet regularly. And they're looking for clusters that would occur of, or unusual numbers of fingerprints that are showing up, and could they be linked in fact, together in some fashion. And once they identify the potential that there is some cluster of outbreaks occurring, they're doing epidemiologic investigation to try to identify it and what were the sources. So they'll go back and interview these clusters of cases. And they'll generate some hypotheses in their minds of the investigators, the epidemiologists that are involved in this. What is likely to be the sources? And they'll construct hypothesis generating questionnaires to try to identify what would be the implicated foods or other sources for the organism. And then, as a result of understanding or analyzing that data, they may have some preliminary decisions about what is the likely food that could be implicated. And they'll then go about investigating and trying to identify the actual source. So just take an organism like salmonella, which is one of the organisms that is food borne related. We had the largest recall of a contaminated or potentially contaminated product, ground turkey in 2011, that resulted from investigation and identification that ground turkey was the likely implicated product. And as a result of further testing, actually isolated the same organism with the same fingerprint in settings which allowed them to say even, who was the manufacturer of that product. And, created a recall which caused the discarding of more than 36 million pounds of ground turkey that FSIS said, we will not allow to be consumed here in this country. So that's the mechanism that goes on associated with helping to make sure that your foods are safe in terms of our regulatory processes. But don't forget your responsibility and what you can do yourself inside your kitchen. I do want to share with you also though that organisms that are typically food borne related aren't necessarily food borne related. They can, those same organisms can be out in the environment. They can infe, affect animals, generally. So dogs or cats can be the source of salmonella as an example. And why it's important to practice basic good hygiene. After you've pet your cat, you should actually wash your hands. For sure, wash your hands before you prepare your dinner tonight. I'd like to tell you a story about salmonella that created an outbreak in people that actually turned out not to be food borne related. And the only way we were able to see, see this outbreak was because of the development of PFGE and the science behind that. So, what happened was there was a PFGE pattern, which was causing people to become ill around the country. And they saw an increase in this incidence, and so they started their investigation as I explained earlier. And they couldn't implicate any foods. So they got epidemiologists more engaged and started expanding, rather than doing it more typical foods type of survey, they started expanding the kinds of questions that they were asking in their epidemiologic investigation. And it turned out that all of these people actually owned snakes as pets. And so people are scratching their heads. My goodness, what would link these snake populations from around the country. Well, maybe the diet actually of snakes. So, they did further investigation, and it turned out that all of these people who owned these snakes actually were feeding pinky mice to their snakes. And it turned out that all of these pinky mice were produced at one particular pinky mice farm. So it turned out to be a food borne illness for the snake, if you will. Probably, they actually were not even symptomatic, because it's not unusual for reptiles, for examples, turtles and so forth to have salmonella in their systems, pass it out into their feces, and they exhibit no signs. But that same organism then contaminates the environment. People get it on their hands. They put their hands to their mouth without washing their hands, and so then they subsequently became infected. I think that's a really interesting story about how our current science is able to trace organisms in a way that allow us to help prevent illness in this country. So one of the directives that FSIS has, is to work in conjunction with and also monitoring what happens in our slaughter plants associated with food production. And the basic approach that is used there is an approach called HACCP, H-A-C-C-P which stands for Hazard Analysis Clinical Control Point. And, essentially what they're asking the slaughter plants to do is to go through their process and identify critical control points that they could apply some strategy that might allow for decreasing a contamination should there be a contamination that exists. The other element I think that's important to share with you is an event that happened that was food borne related, and that was melamine contamination that happened in our foods. That was actually an intentional introduction of a compound that was essentially economic adulteration. So, melamine, was, basically, a substitute for protein content in the food. And so, and it was much cheaper than actually putting protein content into the food. And so foods became contaminated, particularly pet foods, and it resulted in deaths of pets. And that circumstance resulted in the broadest changes in food safety laws that have ever occurred in this country. And, the Food Safety Modernization Act is one of the pieces of legislation that was developed because of that melamine contamination that occurred in US foods and pet foods. And, that piece of legislation is very interesting because it puts prevention of food borne illness at the very top, the most important aspect of what's happening with our agencies in terms of food. And it set a standard that said all of the foods consumed in the US will meet US standards, whether those foods are produced by US producers or whether those foods are imported from outside the US. And I think that that stand, that basically is raising the bar across the board. So in summary, I think it's important to realize that we basically need a team approach all along the food chain. From the very beginning, in terms of production and what happens on the farm clear through the various processes to the consumer. Basically from farm to fork. Everybody doing their job. [MUSIC]
