Food Safety Initiatives

Epi-Lab Partnerships

While APHL’s focus is on public health laboratories, there are actually several arms to the public health system. One of them is comprised of epidemiologists, scientists who use statistics to study the etiology and distribution of disease in a population.

Saved Topics: Agricultural Labs, CIFOR, Food Safety Labs

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Epidemiologists and public health laboratorians typically work together to determine the cause of an outbreak, however this does not always occur as it should.

APHL is committed to increasing cooperation and communication between state and local laboratories and epidemiologists in order to ensure timely investigations and successfully identify common food sources in outbreaks.

Epi/Lab Integrated Reporting

On behalf of the Council to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response (CIFOR), and in collaboration with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), APHL is leading a study that will identify one model site and three pilot sites to develop a system for developing regular combined epidemiology/laboratory reports, using a standard format which will also allow future development of a system of communication and sharing of reports between jurisdictions. It is expected that laboratories with this capacity will be able to identify and successfully investigate more foodborne disease outbreaks.

2005 State-Local Laboratory Foodborne Disease Outbreak Meeting

APHL facilitated a meeting of state and local epidemiologists and laboratorians to identify communication problems and determine ways to overcome them.

Epi-Ready Team Training

Epi-Ready, a collaborative effort between CDC and the National Environmental Health Association, brings together local teams of laboratorians, epidemiologists and sanitarians to improve foodborne outbreak response. APHL provides four travel scholarships each year to enable laboratorians to participate.

Food Safety Initiatives

Contact

Kirsten Larson, MPH