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  5. FDA Grand Rounds - Genomic Perspectives on Foodborne Illness - 12/12/2024
  1. FDA Grand Rounds

Webcast | Virtual

Event Title
FDA Grand Rounds - Genomic Perspectives on Foodborne Illness
December 12, 2024

Date:
December 12, 2024
Time:
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. ET
Image
FDA Grand Rounds - Genomic Perspectives on Foodborne Illness

Speaker

David Lipman, M.D.

David Lipman, M.D.
Senior Science Advisor for Bioinformatics and Genomics
Human Foods Program (HFP) 
Office of Laboratory Operations and Applied Science (OLOAS) 
GenomeTrakr & Computational Science Staff (GCSS)

About the Speaker

Dr. David Lipman joined the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition/FDA in 2021 as Senior Science Advisor in Bioinformatics and Genomics. Dr. Lipman worked at the National Institutes of Health for 36 years and served as the founding Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine/NIH. Under Dr. Lipman’s leadership, NCBI created and managed a number of the most heavily used biomedical information resources including PubMed, PubMed Central, GenBank, SRA, and RefSeq. The Pathogen Detection team at NCBI also works closely with FDA on GenomeTrakr. 

From 2017 through 2019, Dr. Lipman served as Chief Science Officer for Impossible Foods and directed the team that developed and commercialized the current Impossible Burger formulation, the Impossible Whopper, and the sausage and ground pork formulations. 

Dr. Lipman’s own research has focused on molecular evolution, molecular epidemiology, comparative genomics, and the development of computational tools including BLAST. His research papers have been cited by over 200,000 scientific publications. Dr. Lipman is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2023.

About the Presentation

Foodborne illness outbreaks receive considerable attention in the national news, involve multiple states, and cause many human illnesses that are often serious enough to involve hospitalizations and death.  However, large outbreaks only represent a small fraction of the human illness cases each year.  Importantly, infants (<1 yr) account for about 1 in 7 reported cases of salmonellosis (~6,500 cases per year).  We sought to learn more about these non-outbreak cases by analyzing the publicly available pathogen sequence database.  The comparative analysis of hundreds of thousands of pathogen sequences used in this study yielded important clues related to the sources of contamination.  While more than half of all infant illnesses were not members of clusters, over 80% of the clusters with infants also included older individuals.  This implies most cases in infants (i.e. <=3 mos), who consume only breast milk and infant formula, occur because of cross-contamination from non-infant food or early feeding of complementary foods.  Most cases, regardless of age, were in small clusters (e.g. <= size 4).  Despite this, they appear to be associated with contamination from central sites since most clusters had members from multiple states. Furthermore, over half the Salmonella cases were in clusters whose first and last reported case were separated by almost 3 years.  Finally, our results clearly demonstrate the value of interrogating very large genomic datasets for the purpose of understanding sporadic foodborne illnesses.

Learning Objectives

  1. Describe the age distribution of foodborne illnesses caused by the four pathogens: Campylobacter, Salmonella, Escherichia coli, and Listeria.
  2. Explain the evidence supporting the inference that the many small, independent contamination episodes are due to distribution from central sites as opposed to local sources.
  3. Evaluate which Salmonella serovars are best suited for reduction upstream of the consumer and why.

Webcast Recording 

Webcast Recording 

Event Materials

Activity Outline - Continuing Education 

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