The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year under the Trump administration scaled back a program called “FoodNet” which surveilled pathogens such as cyclospora, which causes “explosive diarrhea.”
The Washington Post reports that FoodNet faced budget cuts because funding for food safety hasn’t been maintained over the last several years, according to Dan Jernigan, former director of CDC’s Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.
FoodNet wasn’t made for real-time outbreak detection or response, Jernigan told The Washington Post.
“Routine outbreak investigators are the firefighters responding to a specific blaze. FoodNet is the citywide system that tracks how often fires occur and whether the overall risk is rising. Removing cyclosporiasis from FoodNet does not take the firefighters away from the current outbreak, but it does remove part of the system that tells us how large the problem is and whether it is getting worse over time,” Jernigan said.
Consumer Reports notes that the CDC cutting cyclospora surveillance could have affected the agency’s ability to identify the outbreak sooner and minimize the problem.
