Part 3 - WPPC- FDA meeting Sept. 11 Jack Guzewich

John (Jack) Guzewich had a quick-paced delivery, and the remarks below are only the first portion of his comments at the WPPC FDA meeting on Sept. 11. In the later Q and A session, Jack often takes a lead role in explaining the FDA position, usually with refreshing frankness.

From his bio:

John (Jack) Guzewich is a senior environmental health scientist in the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition of the Food and Drug Administration, where he has worked since 1977.

From his remarks:


Good afternoon everyone. I will speak a little bit on outbreak investigations and a little bit about traceback.
Outbreaks in the United States are investigated by state and local public health agencies. A lot of people have gotten the impression during the recent Salmonella Saintpual outbreak that FDA is in some way involved in the outbreak investigation, but that really isn’t the case.
In the United States, responsibility for epidemiology and surveillance in pending outbreaks lies primarily with state and local public health agencies.
And that was the case in this recent outbreak. It was first detected by New Mexico and Texas health departments, their health public health lab and epidemiologists at the state and local level. As the investigation expanded to ultimately 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada, those investigations were conducted in all those states primarily by state and local health agencies sometimes working in partnership with their state departments of agriculture.
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta job was to provide consultations with those state and local agencies, in a coordinating role. Initially this investigation recently conducted was led by New Mexico, because they were the first ones who detected the outbreak
As it became apparent it involved more than New Mexico, that it was Texas, that it was more states, that baton was passed on to CDC and CDC performed in a coordinating role after that; they held over 50 conference calls involving all the organizations; they had epidemiologists in Atlanta that were heavily involved in compiling information and analyzing it, along with the states. They sent people from Atlanta out to work in several states on what are called epidemiology aids or assistants to these state and local investigations and perform what state or locals requested of CDC.
So the activities that made the link to tomatoes initially and later peppers were made by the epidemiologists and laboratory agencies at local, state, and CDC levels, respectively.
FDA gets involved when those agencies come to us and say “we’ve implicated an FDA regulated food.”