Earlier this month, when the recommendations of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” Commission were leaked, I had an unhappy exchange with a former supporter of our organization, who felt we should be doing more to celebrate the administration’s success in getting companies to pledge to remove synthetic food dyes, a longstanding goal for CSPI. 

I urged our ex-supporter to take a deeper look at how rapidly leaders appointed by President Trump have dismantled public health systems since January, losses that will cause profound harm. He wasn’t persuaded: “Nobody in charge in your lifetime has done a damn thing that has marked any improvement in health of our country,” he clapped back. Like many disillusioned with government, he saw no reason for concern in losing a public health system that, for him, held no benefits.  

This got me thinking, “Are there any food safety public health victories in my lifetime?” I was born in 1982 in Seattle, so my mind went immediately to the moment when I was 11 years old, listening to local public radio and hearing about a deadly outbreak of tainted hamburgers sold at the regional chain Jack in the Box. Investigators at the Washington Department of Public Health had spotted an unusually high incidence of hemolytic uremic syndrome, sometimes a complication of E. coli infection, and, through careful interviewing of patients by epidemiologists, were able to trace the source back to hamburgers sold at the chain and ultimately to five federally regulated slaughterhouses. The public outrage following this incident, in which four children died, triggered an avalanche of change at USDA and in the meat industry, and led to the banning pathogenic E. coli from ground beef. Eventually, it also gave birth to modern food safety regulation, implementing hazard-control techniques pioneered by the US space program.  

Not only did public health systems work to identify the cause of the Jack in the Boxoutbreak, they also offered a way to track the impact of the new policies: In tandem with the new approaches, leaders at the CDC created a system christened the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), which since 1996 has conducted surveillance for pathogens transmitted commonly through food. Through FoodNet, we can now see that a government ban on pathogenic E. coli in ground beef had an impact: In the decade following the ban, the incidence of foodborne illness from the pathogen dropped by more than 40 percent.  

FoodNet can also show when public health interventions are not working. It was a lack of progress on Salmonella illnesses, revealed by FoodNet, that forced the USDA to reconsider its regulation of Salmonella in poultry in 2021, moving to replace standards that surveillance had proved ineffective with new standards banning high-risk Salmonella in poultry, similar to steps that had worked well in ground beef. That initiative has also now largely been sidelined by the Trump Administration. 

Now, along with many other aspects of public health, the CDC’s foodborne illness detection and surveillance systems are under threat. Programs that have faced financial strain through years of flat funding by a divided Congress are now on the brink of crumbling under new pressures to cut costs and jettison public servants across government.  

These critical programs include block grants to states to help solve outbreaks, systems like the CDC’s PulseNet, which uses DNA fingerprinting to identify outbreak clusters, and the FDA’s  Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation team, which is responsible for identifying the foods that cause outbreaks and tracing these back to their source. 

Now, FoodNet appears to be the first of these systems to show outward signs of the damage, reducing its activities in the face of resource pressure. NBC News broke the story this week that FoodNet will be reducing tracking of foodborne pathogens from eight pathogens to just two, because funding has not kept pace with the system's resource needs. This loss of surveillance means we will no longer have a clear picture of whether steps to improve food safety really work for many of the pathogens that make us sick. 

 Ultimately, I wouldn’t know how to persuade a supporter of Secretary Kennedy’s position on synthetic dyes that preventing outbreaks should matter just as much as food chemical safety. And I don’t have to make that case, because mass firings and understaffing at the FDA and other agencies undermine both types of work. Without strong regulation, victories in food chemical safety, like the banning of transfats (estimated to prevent 50,000 deaths per year), would not have been possible.   

The fact that so many Americans apparently fail to recognize the recent benefits of public health programs represents an epic failure of communication and political systems, more than any reflection on the role these institutions play in improving our lives. 

One thing is clear: We can’t understand what is happening to our health if the evidence of population health outcomes is never recorded. That’s why the programs and people who detect and prevent illness are at the core of public health. Programs like FoodNet are the eyes of public health, helping us see otherwise invisible threats. Keeping those programs running at full strength should be our top priority.