Foodborne Illness

FDA Releases New Tool to Help Prevent Intentional Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released a new tool to help bolster the food industry’s defense measures against an act of intentional food contamination. The Food Defense Plan Builder is a comprehensive, easy-to-use software program designed to help owners and ...More
2 weeks ago
Posted in News
Slide Show: Foodborne Illness Trends

ICT presents highlights from the CDC's latest FoodNet report showing data on foodborne illness trends for 2012. ...More
April 18, 2013
Posted in Galleries
Infections From Some Foodborne Pathogens Increased While Others Remained Unchanged in 2012

The nation’s annual food safety report card is out and it shows that 2012 rates of infections from two germs spread commonly through food have increased significantly when compared to a baseline period of 2006-2008, while rates of most others have not changed during the ...More
April 18, 2013
Posted in News
Scissor-Like Enzyme Points Toward Treatment of Infectious Disease

UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report that a pathogen annually blamed for an estimated 90 million cases of foodborne illness defeats a host's immune response by using a fat-snipping enzyme to cut off cellular communication. "Our findings provide insight into ...More
April 4, 2013
Posted in News
Fighting Listeria and Other Foodborne Illnesses with Nanobiotechnology

Engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method to kill deadly pathogenic bacteria, including listeria, in food handling and packaging. This innovation represents an alternative to the use of antibiotics or chemical decontamination in ...More
April 2, 2013
Posted in News
Pesticide Application is Potential Source of Noroviruses in Fresh Food Supply Chains

Human norovirus (hNoV), also known as the winter vomiting bug, is one of the most common stomach bugs in the world. The virus is highly contagious, causing vomiting and diarrhea, and the number of affected cases is growing. Currently there is no cure; sufferers have to let ...More
March 13, 2013
Posted in News
Say No to Double-Dipping this Super Bowl Sunday, Germ Expert Advises

If you choose your menu carefully, you can increase the chance that your Super Bowl party on Sunday stays in the germ-free zone, says Donna Duberg, a germ expert at Saint Louis University. One of the big keys, says Duberg, assistant professor of clinical lab science, is ...More
January 30, 2013
Posted in News
CDC Releases First Estimates of the Food Sources of All Foodborne Illnesses in the U.S.

A new paper from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Attribution of Foodborne Illnesses, Hospitalizations, and Deaths to Food Commodities By Using Outbreak Data, United States, 1998-2008” is being published in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal. For ...More
January 29, 2013
Posted in News
CDC Investigating Multistate Outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium Infections Linked to Ground Beef

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is collaborating with public health officials in many states and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS) to investigate a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium ...More
January 28, 2013
Posted in News
Investigators Study Incubation Period for Listeriosis

Listeriosis is a foodborne infection with a low incidence but a high case fatality rate. Unlike common foodborne diseases, the incubation period can be long. The first incubation periods were documented during a large listeriosis outbreak published in 1987 by Linnan and al. ...More
January 14, 2013
Posted in News