Protecting consumers from foodborne illness requires both rapid response when outbreaks occur, and focused attention on preventing outbreaks from happening.
Over the last decade, following enactment of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the FDA has investigated more outbreaks and conducted more research to advance our scientific understanding of the pathogens that contaminate our food — than any other time in history. We now know more than ever about the reoccurrence of contributing factors that can cause contamination of certain foods by specific disease-causing bacteria and how all parts of the food safety system – which includes the FDA and other government agencies, state and local health departments, the food industry, and others – can work together to keep such contamination from happening.
The FDA is compiling these learnings into a series of Prevention Strategies to Enhance Food Safety that identify and target specific patterns that have emerged with certain food-hazard pairings. The strategies contain recommendations to guide the work of preventing future foodborne illnesses.
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