* All times are based on Canada/Eastern EST.
07:30
Canada/Eastern
6 parallel sessionsSunrise Session: Culture-Independent Diagnostic Tests
Sunrise Session: Join the In Crowd: Highly Effective Collaborations to Enhance Foodborne Outbreak Response
Sunrise Session: Norovirus
Sunrise Session: Preliminary Campylobacter Attribution Using Sporadic Case Data Obtained from State and Local Health Department
Sunrise Session: Training Tools and Resources Developed by the New York Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence to Support EH
08:30
Canada/Eastern
Welcome and Keynote
Welcome: Dr. Jocelyn Hauser, DC Department of Forensic Sciences, Dr. Anil Mangla, DC Health, Robert Tauxe (CDC) Keynote: Dr. Keeve Nachman, PhD, MHS, Associate Director, Center for a Livable Future, Johns Hopkins University Moderators: Gwen Biggerstaff (CDC), Anna Newton (CDC)
10:30
Canada/Eastern
Plenary Session I: State of Outbreaks Panel
This panel will include a series of presentations to describe the current state of foodborne and enteric outbreak response. The Branch Chief of the Outbreak Response and Prevention Branch (ORPB) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will discuss broad outbreak trends over the past few years (outbreak solve rates and size), with supporting data from the National Outbreak Reporting System (NORS). Next, a speaker from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will build upon CDC’s presentation by discussing the Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation (CORE) Network’s role in controlling and stopping outbreaks. CORE’s multidisciplinary response teams are responsible for coordinating information flow across organizations during an outbreak response, evaluating incoming data to help inform response strategies, and conducting traceback investigations. Finally, speakers from state and local public health departments will share their own successes and challenges with outbreak response (e.g., patients refusing to be interviewed by public health and new ways or methods of attempting to reach them, as well as patients refusing to share data with public health, including grocery store shopper-card records).
11:45
Canada/Eastern
13:30
Canada/Eastern
Plenary Session II: Capitalizing on Health Equity
This panel will include a series of case presentations that will discuss several health equity topics within enteric diseases. A laboratory scientist from the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) will describe findings from survey distributed to laboratory directors to identify types of health equity variables collected in public health laboratories (PHLs) and how they are used. The Associate Director for the Surveillance, Information Management, and Statistics Office (SIMSO) will describe feedback received from state public health partners on a survey that the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases (DFWED) completed titled, "Standardizing Health Equity Data Elements Across Surveillance Systems in DFWED." As part of this survey, SIMSO recommends DFWED-specific standards for health equity data elements and value sets across their surveillance systems. During their presentation, SIMSO will provide an update on the variables they will standardize first. Public health partners at the local levels will also discuss health equity topics, such as unlicensed food vendors in Orange County, California and New York City’s successes and challenges with expanding language access and using interpretation and translation services to promote public health services and investigate outbreaks. Finally, a health communications specialist from the Outbreak Response and Prevention Branch (ORPB) at CDC will describe success and challenges with risk communication during outbreaks and tailoring their messaging to reach communities that may be impacted.
16:00
Canada/Eastern
Plenary Session III: Capitalizing on New Technology
This panel will include a series of case presentations that will discuss recent and/or upcoming advancements in technology that will impact the work of public health professionals involved with foodborne and enteric disease outbreak response. Laboratory scientists and bioinformaticians from CDC’s Enteric Diseases Laboratory Branch (EDLB) will discuss developments in a metagenomics pipeline pilot for solving undetermined outbreaks; updates on highly multiplexed amplicon sequencing (HMAs) for PulseNet surveillance subtyping; and PulseNet 2.0. As part of these presentations, EDLB laboratory scientists will revisit revamped metagenomics work to solve outbreaks of unknown etiology and highlight a new roadmap and opportunities for pilot collaboration with the Undetermined Outbreaks (UnO) project. As part of this project, EDLB is developing a two-tiered pipeline to discover novel foodborne illnesses and changes to known pathogens. Laboratory scientists will also discuss EDLB’s development of HMAS panels targeting regions of pathogen genomes important to surveillance in stool-derived DNA. Finally, the EDLB Branch Chief will cover plans for the retirement of BioNumerics at the end of 2024 and the development and launch of a new bioinformatics and data management infrastructure, PulseNet 2.0. PulseNet 2.0 is being developed in response to changing needs, including the ever-growing volume of WGS data uploaded to BioNumerics and workflows. Next, a CDC speaker will share updates on CDC’s data modernization initiative (DMI) and data exchange. The goal of DMI is to get better, faster, actionable insights for decision-making at all levels of public health. CDC’s vision is to create one public health community that can engage robustly with healthcare, communicate meaningfully with the public, improve health equity, and have the means to protect and promote health. Finally, speakers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will describe the issuance of FDA’s Traceability Rule under the Food Modernization Safety Act (FSMA). The traceability rule was designed to facilitate faster identification and rapid removal of potentially contaminated food from the market, resulting in fewer foodborne illnesses and/or deaths. Speakers will also describe how the FDA CORE Response Network is implementing the rule, and a product tracing system that FDA is building to support the rule.
17:15
Canada/Eastern
Award Presentations
The PulseStar Award For Outstanding Achievement in PulseNet, the National Molecular Subtyping Network for Foodborne Disease Surveillance Presented by: Jennifer Adams (APHL), Karim Morey (OR), Robbie Springer (NC), Eric Bandt (OH), Karim George (KY) The John J. Guzewich Environmental Public Health Award For Environmental Public Health Professionals with Responsibility for Response and Management of Foodborne Illness Outbreaks Presented by: Jesse Bliss (NEHA)