Dive Brief:
- Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there are two areas where changes could greatly improve food safety -- increasing the amount of public-health data collected from the foodservice sector and increasing food-worker education.
- To improve the situation, CDC is launching two initiatives.
- First, the National Voluntary Environmental Assessment Information System is a surveillance effort designed at monitoring and regulating school cafeterias, banquet facilities and other foodservice operations.
- Second, the CDC has created an e-learning course aimed at helping state and local officials investigate a food-borne illness outbreak at restaurants and other foodservice operations.
Dive Insight:
We applaud any effort to fight food-borne illness. And in the era of big data, we applaud any effort to gather more information about what goes wrong in an outbreak. That becomes particularly true when we read, as we did in the coverage of the CDC's initiatives, that there are still some very simple things going wrong and then not being reported. How, we ask, is it possible for anyone in the food business to not be documenting hand-washing practices and food-prep procedures?
