Remarks prepared for delivery by Jerold Mande, Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety, for the joint FDA, CDC, and FSIS public workshop, "Measuring Progress on Food Safety: Current Status and Future Directions," March 30, 2010, in Washington, DC.

Introduction and Acknowledgements
Good morning and thank you for joining us at today's metrics workshop.

Before my remarks, let me take this opportunity to thank my good friend Mike Taylor for his food safety leadership at FDA, as well as the respective staffs at CDC, FSIS, and FDA who helped organize this important meeting.

I also want to thank Tino Cuellar for joining us and demonstrating what has been an extraordinary commitment by the White House to protecting our nation's food supply. Tino brings a sharp and probing intellect to our task and we are better for it.

Food Safety is a Shared Goal
There are those here today who have fought on behalf of consumers for years. There are the family members who have lived the horror of our system when it fails. There are industry professionals who have made producing safe food the core of their business. And there are government officials who have been entrusted by the American people to keep our food safe.

We all work toward a common goal: safe food. I want to begin my remarks from that shared premise.

Sometimes we have different ideas of how to get there—what the best policies may be to get us there—but our bottom line is the same. We want the assurance that food won't make our families sick.

Yet providing that assurance requires constant vigilance, and it cannot be done alone. We must work together along the farm-to-table continuum to ensure safe food. The president and Secretaries Vilsack and Sebelius, understand this, and the administration has sought unprecedented collaboration among its food safety agencies through the Food Safety Working Group and meetings like this one.

The importance of today's meeting can be described in one sentence: What doesn't get measured doesn't get done. I want to state that again, because it is the most important message I want you to take from today's meeting: What doesn't get measured doesn't get done. Business gurus have repeated this mantra for years and it is as true for us as it is for them. It is why today's meeting is so important. Continued progress on food safety depends on adopting and implementing the right metrics.

A Watershed Moment in Food Safety
This is a watershed moment in food safety.

These moments, these opportunities, do not come often. But when they do, they significantly change our trajectory as businesses and regulators alike.

One came at the turn of the twentieth century, when Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle uncovered filthy conditions in the meatpacking industry. At that time, foodborne illness was a leading cause of death.

Sinclair's exposé and the public uproar that followed led to the passing of the Food and Drugs Act, as well as the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

We operated under these laws for some time, and made steady progress. And for a time issues such as economic adulteration surpassed microbial adulteration as a major concern.

Until 1993. It was then that food safety and inspection was turned on its head once again, when an historic E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in undercooked ground beef caused 400 illnesses and four deaths in the Pacific Northwest. This outbreak was followed with another O157 outbreak, this time in unpasteurized apple juice.

In response, USDA adopted the science-based system of preventive controls we have in place today. The landmark Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Systems, or HACCP rule, defined a new, preventive framework for industry and regulators. It helps protect the nation's food supply through continuous improvement of preventive pathogen control.

With HACCP, FSIS became the public health regulatory agency it is today. And it worked. We made gains under this system for nearly a decade.

We also saw advances during this same period in the tracking and identification of pathogens, with the establishment of FoodNet and PulseNet, which allowed us to begin linking pathogen reductions to illness reductions.

In 1997, we set a food safety goal for the nation to cut the rates of foodborne illness from the most common pathogens by half by 2010. But we reached a plateau. Most progress toward this goal occurred before 2004. Lower rates mean less illness so over the last decade we have moved in the right direction. But we need to know how many people get sick, from which contaminants, in which foods to design a system that will push through the current plateau and drive foodborne illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths significantly lower.

When the president took office last year, we were in the midst of a large recall. As you know, he responded by establishing the Food Safety Working Group within 60 days of taking office and appointed the secretaries of Health and Human Services and Agriculture as co-chairs.

Which brings us to this, the next critical juncture in food safety.

Guided largely by the Working Group, we're looking at the entire food safety system, and across jurisdictions and products. It is a watershed moment. We have a president, two secretaries, and leaders in Congress who have made improving food safety a priority.

The status quo is unacceptable. Our bosses, the American people, have made that clear. In some cases our laws are outdated, our system too reactive, and our structure too fragmented given the complexity of modern food. We need the tools and coordination to meet the challenges of a 21st century food system, and we need better metrics so that we can measure what needs to get done.

Food safety must be improved. Passage of FDA food safety legislation, a high priority for the administration, is a key step. Today's meeting is another. The Food Safety Working Group has made metrics a cornerstone of our efforts.

Major Food Safety Efforts at USDA
USDA is helping lead the change we need to improve food safety.

Led by Secretary Tom Vilsack, major new and revamped efforts are underway to improve the safety of the products we regulate:

• We have challenged our leadership, scientists, and analysts to think strategically and creatively about policies to reduce foodborne illnesses.
• We're implementing many priorities identified through the Food Safety Working Group deliberations such as new pathogen reduction performance standards for control of Salmonella and Campylobacter.
• We're actively discussing ways to improve product tracing and better educating and training our workforce regarding E. coli O157:H7.
• We're supporting the Secretary's renewed emphasis on research; developing new tools such as a test for non-O157 STECs, and promoting food safety research through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
• And of course, we continue preparations to launch our dynamic data analytics system, the Public Health Information System, which will revolutionize the way FSIS detects and responds to foodborne hazards.

But while each of these steps could help bring about the significant reduction of foodborne illness we seek, we won't know how best to deploy them unless we can link their use to specific reductions in illness. To do that we must be able to more precisely measure changes in foodborne illness. And to do that we must build robust data collection and analysis.

We are not regulating for the sake of regulation. We want results.

Policy in any area is best when a), it's rooted in science and b), it's measured for impact. This same standard applies to food safety.

We want to ensure that our programs, interventions, and measures have a positive effect on public health.

So what do we do? What would it take to cut the number of foodborne illnesses in half again?

We need assessment tools to guide our efforts, gauge the success of our policies and interventions, and make a direct link between our actions and outcomes. We need to know what is working—or not working—in order to reach our goal of sharply reducing foodborne illnesses and deaths. And we need specific, measurable, timely markers along the way to know we are on track and to make adjustments if we are not.

For example, although FDA, FSIS and other agencies have varied roles in our nation's food safety, we essentially begin from the same place: the estimated burden of foodborne illness.

Before we make decisions on food safety policies and interventions, we must know how many people are getting sick each year from foodborne contaminants, and from which ones? Who, exactly, is getting sick and from which foods? And, overall, are we making progress toward reducing foodborne illnesses?

These are central questions. However, developing answers to them that we can be confident in and base policy on has proven difficult.

To reach our goals, we must measure progress along the entire farm-to-table continuum. Improvements in on-farm interventions can bring improvements at slaughterhouses, which can improve control at processing establishments and so on, until products reach the consumer.

We must leverage data. FSIS has inspectors in our regulated establishments every day. We must make better use of them to measure and monitor levels of contaminants in our products.

And we must better use what we know about industry compliance, process control, and other indicators to assess their impact on public health.

Pathogens evolve and spread through the food system, and as long as we approach them as if they respect the purview or jurisdiction of the farm, the producer, the USDA, FDA, or other agencies, they will elude us.

That's why the president has charged us to work in a unified way to meet the challenges of our modern food safety system. This workshop is an example of the collaboration our president expects and what is needed to improve food safety.

In other words, we're in this effort together. The progress of each part of the system is tied to the progress of the other. And we must work together to eliminate foodborne illnesses and deaths.

At today's meeting, we'll begin a discussion about reaching this goal in a smart way, and measuring our progress on protecting the nation's food supply.

Conclusion
Thank you for being here and I hope that you will join us to make this a historic turning point in national food safety.

On behalf of Secretary Vilsack and USDA, I assure you that we hold ourselves accountable to the public and to making real, considerable gains in improving public health through safe food.