Issue View | Council I | 2023 Biennial Meeting

This issue was submitted for consideration at a previous biennial meeting, see issue: 2020-I-015 ; the recommended solution has been revised .

FBIIC3-Amend 2022 FDA Food Code to Provide Access for FBI Investigation

The Committee would like for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to add language to provide the regulatory and/or health authority access to investigate reports of foodborne illness.

Currently, the Food Code does not provide access for regulatory/health authorities to gather information in a food establishment for a foodborne illness investigation. It contains language to assess information on code compliance (what is currently occurring) and plan review (what will occur in the future) but lacks language to assess and gather historical information such as processing record review, product traceback, purchase history, etc. (which is the primary focus of a foodborne illness investigation).

Furthermore, Standard 5 of the FDA Voluntary National Retail Food Program Standards (VNRFPS) assesses whether a regulatory program has developed policies to investigate foodborne illness. These policies implicitly rely on States' public health authorities for preventing disease transmission. Language permitting access in the Food Code will ensure that all jurisdictions that adopt the Food Code will have the same baseline authority to investigate foodborne illness.

Every year in the United States there are millions of cases of foodborne illness (Scallan et al., 2011), and a majority of these cases are attributable to food establishments (Jones & Angulo, 2006). Investigation of these reports of illness is of paramount importance to a) stop additional people from being exposed and becoming ill; b) understand the system failure within a food establishment that led people to become ill; and c) identify a source of contaminated food that may have entered the food establishment.

The Food Code Annex 2's supporting documents reference the Voluntary National Retail Food Program Standards along with the Council to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response's Guidelines for Foodborne Outbreak Response. Both documents include the need for investigating foodborne illness outbreaks.

Conducting investigations into how people became sick is an integral part of a food safety program. By understanding the system failures that resulted in a foodborne outbreak, practices can be changed to prevent the failure from happening in the future. Because of the investigation's importance, FDA includes this subject matter in VNRFPS Standard 2 under the epidemiology construct and International Food Protection Training Institute (IFPTI) includes this as a foundational element for the basic competency level. Additionally, the important nature of this work has led to the development of additional advanced courses (e.g., FDA ER324 Epi-Ready for Response Teams, and CDC's Environmental Assessment Training Series).

that a letter be sent to the FDA requesting that Chapter 8 of the most current published version of the Food Code be amended to include:

The REGULATORY AUTHORITY shall act when it has reasonable cause to believe that a FOOD ESTABLISHMENT may be associated with a foodborne illness investigation; by assessing all relevant facilities, EQUIPMENT, FOOD, personnel, and available records.