Council to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response

March 17, 2025

About

The Council to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response (CIFOR) is a multidisciplinary collaboration of national associations and federal agencies working together since 2006 to improve methods to detect, investigate, control, and prevent foodborne disease outbreaks. Council member representatives include expertise in epidemiology, environmental health, public health laboratory activities, and food regulation at the local, state, and federal levels.

According to CDC, foodborne illness affects one in six Americans annually. Of the estimated 48 million who get sick from a foodborne illness each year, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die.

Many organizations work to reduce foodborne illness. Outbreak identification and investigation is a key area where multidisciplinary public health professionals must collaborate. CIFOR was created to develop and share guidelines, processes, and products that will facilitate effective foodborne outbreak response.

Products

CIFOR has contributed to the development of a variety of products to assist with responding to foodborne disease outbreaks. Recent products include the CIFOR 3rd Edition Guidelines for Foodborne Disease Outbreak Response and its companion toolkit that contains a series of worksheets and model program activities.

The CIFOR Toolkit helps state and local health departments understand the contents of the Guidelines, furthers their ability to conduct self-assessments of their outbreak detection and investigation procedures, and facilitates implementation of appropriate recommendations from the nine chapters in the Guidelines.

The CIFOR Learning Modules is another resource that provide summaries of the CIFOR Guidelines on a variety of topics, including legal preparedness, planning and preparation, surveillance and outbreak detection, control measures, and multi-jurisdictional outbreaks.

Workgroup Spotlight

CIFOR is comprised of a Governance Committee and workgroups that fulfill the CIFOR mission:

• Workgroup 1: Increase the capacity of public health systems to identify and eliminate contributing factors and environmental antecedents associated with foodborne disease outbreaks.
• Workgroup 2: Increase communication and collaboration among the network of public health professionals responding to foodborne disease outbreaks.
• Workgroup 3: Improve the ability of public health professionals who investigate foodborne disease outbreaks to implement effective recruitment and retention strategies.
• Workgroup 4: Identify and promote strategies to reduce the time from specimen collection to completion of whole genome sequence analysis.
• Workgroup 5: Identify and promote strategies to collect, integrate, analyze, and act on data more rapidly and completely during foodborne disease outbreaks. Contact us if you are interested in joining or learning more about a CIFOR Workgroup.

Email us at environmentalhealth@astho.org if you are interested in joining or learning more about a CIFOR Workgroup.