Improving Burden of Disease and Source Attribution Estimates

Disease burden estimates provide the foundation for evidence-informed policy making and are critical to public health priority setting around food safety. Several efforts have recently been undertaken to better quantify the burden of foodborne disease, but there is still much work to be done. While burden estimates are crucial to raising awareness of foodborne diseases, estimating their public health impact, and ranking diseases according to their importance, they may be insufficient for policy making.

Knowledge on the most important sources of foodborne disease is key to identifying and prioritizing food safety intervention strategies and preventing and reducing the burden of diseases in a population. This chapter outlines areas of improvement that would lead to improved estimates including enhancing foodborne disease surveillance infrastructure and improving our understanding of the burden of foodborne chemical exposures and chronic sequelae and provides an overview of attributing the burden of foodborne disease to specific foods.