Minnesota Health Officers Get Well-Earned Recognition
The USA Today tells readers across the country what many food safety professionals already know:
“When it comes to food-borne illness investigation, ‘Minnesota is leap years ahead of . . . most of the rest of the nation,’ says James Phillips, head of infectious diseases for the Arkansas Department of Health.”
One of Minnesota’s advantages is the resources devoted to “Team Diarrhea,” a group of seven to nine graduate students who work the phones interviewing and taking detailed exposure histories from every person who tests positive for Salmonella or E. coli O157:H7. Victims may be interviewed twice as further exposure evidence is gathered from other consumers. With this attention to detail, more outbreaks can be identified.
“Minnesota ‘has a lot of best practices . . . to get to people quickly to find out what they ate, the CDC’s [Ali]Kahn says.”
So congrats to the hard-working professionals in Minnesota.
