Rewind: WPPC-FDA meeting Sept. 11 - Marjorie Davidson on communications

More from the WPPC-FDA meeting of Sept. 11 - Part 8, if you are counting at home. These comments wrap up the FDA panel's address to the WPPC. These remarks are given by Marjorie Davidson, communications specialist at FDA, concerning communications with industry and consumers during the Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak of 2008.


Marjorie Davidson: I have been asked to go over a few points on communications during this recent outbreak, I’d like to preface this by saying we communicate with other federal agencies, state and local governments and within FDA. My focus is concerning the agency’s communication with industry during the outbreak, as well as communications with consumers.
First communications with industry; we learned from our lessons learned” from the spinach as well as when the FDA participated in USDA sponsored stakeholder conference earlier this year, and the message coming from the industry was loud and clear, they wanted to be alerted right away when an incident occurred and an issue was arising and wanted to be kept advised of the progress of the investigation as it progressed through an outbreak.
So during our Saintpaul outbreak, we called trade associations and industry and met with them regularly on conference calls. We called them first very much earlier than we did in the spinach outbreak as soon as we had an implicated vehicle. Then subsequently we held regular conference calls with the associations to keep them apprised of what was going in the investigation as it went forward. At times, were asked to meet more frequently than we had scheduled and we arranged them as much as humanly possible to make sure we continually kept our communications open. Industry industry(associations) was invited to participate in a listen only mode to media press briefings so they could be kept aware of what kind of issues the media was interested in as soon as we heard about them as well.
To be effective, communication needs to be two ways, and not only did we pass information on (to the industry) we needed to hear back from the industry as well. We asked throughout this outbreak industry to provide information about distribution patterns, harvesting, and seasonality. We got information back rapidly and concisely and it at was very, very helpful to help us target the investigations and focus our resources.
Right now the agency is developing a comprehensive plan from the “lessons learned” from this outbreak to address communications with industry and you will be hearing about this in the near future. We are interested in getting feedback from you on how the communication worked and what we can do to prepare best for next time.
Communications and consumers; our first consumers is to get accurate information out to the general public as quickly as we can in order to protect public health. At the same time, we don’t’ want to unnecessarily limit consumer access to nutritious produce, in this case. So as a result, we attempted to narrow the warnings early by putting an exclusionary list up. We wanted to indicate geographic areas where produce was being grown that wasn’t implicated in this outbreak. This was a very resource intensive activity but we wanted the market to stay open – the ones that weren’t implicated. This was our rationale in developing the list and we are reviewing our thinking about this and will be interested in talking with you all as we go forward with our plans. Another thing we learned from spinach (and communications with consumers during that outbreak) is that our internal daily deliberation process often caused to get information out too late and we missed the nightly news deadlines.
.
As a result of this, we held press briefings earlier in the day. Another issue that developed during spinach was that CDC and FDA were issuing separate press releases so it made it quite challenging to make sure our messages were the same and there wasn’t confusion with the public. So we held press briefings in cooperation with CDC. This was particularly helpful in keeping our messages similar between federal agencies but also to further explain what was really a complicated message in this particular outbreak. It gave us a dialogue with the media and were able to clarify things quickly.
The Web was also a critical part of communications during the outbreak and it was complicated by the fact we were doing massive renovation of our Web site ad it hit right in the middle of that occurring. We were able through use of the Web to get much more detailed information different (audiences) for difference concerns. We were able to get much more specific information out that way. We also realize we need to have available to us more graphics and other visual aids to help visually represent was what is going on to consumers and other stakeholders looking at the Web.
Another lesson learned from spinach was consumers didn’t know when the outbreak was over;. Many of them still thought (during the spinach outbreak) it was ongoing when it was for all practically purposes stopped. So during this particular outbreak, on two separate occasions, first after tomatoes and after for peppers, we had press briefing and announced with great finality that consumers could return to enjoying produce and that FDA believed that there was no implicated product still out in the market place.
I’d like to add a final note on communications. FDA – as well as they are doing with communications with industry - FDA is doing an extensive analysis of is communications with consumers over these next few months. We are going to particularly focusing on our ability to use new technology to get information to the public as well as to other stakeholders. We are also going to be conducting research to explore how messaging, to try to understand better how it is received by consumers in the market place and how we can work better frame and identify our messages.
Jack Guzewich: We can think the panel for their overviews, now we can open the floor for discussion and for questions and answers...



TK: From Marjorie's comments, it seems to me the agency was fairly accommodating with the industry during the salmonella outbreak investigation. As you will see in the Q and A, a good portion of the industry's frustrations lie with the CDC and federal laws that prohibit sharing of specific information about an outbreak with industry. Next up (all in good time, my friends) a transcript of the question and answer session from the WPPC-FDA meeting of Sept. 11.