- Yesterday, FDA’s Office of Coordinated Outbreak Response, Evaluation, & Emergency Preparedness (CORE+EP) released its annual report summarizing outbreaks of foodborne illness and certain adverse events in FDA-regulated human foods. The office’s “CORE” team responds to acute outbreaks and certain adverse events, while the “EP” team is focused on food defense, traceability, and supply chain monitoring activities not necessarily linked to an acute outbreak or adverse event. The report highlights that CORE-EP played a central role in policy-related activities and implementation of FDA’s food defense rule at 21 CFR Part 121.
- The investigations summarized in the report were conducted in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as well as state and local partners. CORE-EP maintains a table of its investigations, both active and closed. The table does not include outbreak investigations related to shellfish (managed by FDA’s Division of Seafood Safety), animal food (managed by CVM), or USDA regulated products. The largest portion of the 26 outbreak responses that were initiated by CORE in 2025 stemmed from produce vegetables (35% of responses), followed by multi-ingredient foods (29% of responses).
- This year CORE-EP launched “Executive Incident Summary (EIS) Abstracts,” which provide high level summaries of the steps taken by the Response Team. CORE-EP also published two “Foodborne Outbreak Overview of Data (FOOD) Reports,” which provide information on food-pathogen pairs that have been linked to repeated outbreaks of foodborne illness. Other CORE publications related to its outbreak investigations can be found at CORE Publications | FDA.
- Keller and Heckman will continue to monitor outbreaks of foodborne illness and FDA’s response to them.