Earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a significant shift toward greater data transparency in its handling of foodborne illness investigations. The agency will now routinely publish Executive Incident Summary (EIS) Abstracts and Foodborne Outbreak Overview of Data (FOOD) Reports once an investigation is complete. 

Executive Incident Summary (EIS) Abstracts 

Once a foodborne illness investigation is concluded (i.e. no ongoing public health risk), the FDA will publish EIS Abstracts summarizing the investigation’s findings. These abstracts, that are made by the FDA’s Coordinated Outbreak Response & Evaluation (CORE) teams, include high-level descriptions of: 

• Traceback activities 

• Lab / microbial testing 

• Epidemiological findings 

• Prevention or mitigation lessons 

• It is worth noting that trade secrets and identifiable information will not be shown in these abstracts. 

To Access these abstracts, you can follow these steps 

• Access the FDA Core table through: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investigations-foodborne-illness-outbreaks  

• Find the “closed investigation” towards the bottom of the page, after the “open investigations” table 

• Click on the Reference # for the investigation, a PDF file should pop-out or be downloaded into your computer containing the Abstract. 

FOOD Reports 

FOOD Reports dig deeper. They are retrospective, data-driven analyses focusing on pathogen–commodity pairs with repeated association in outbreaks. For example, in its initial releases, FDA released FOOD Reports on: 

• Hepatitis A outbreaks tied to berries 

• Salmonella outbreaks linked to tahini 

Access the reports here: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/foodborne-outbreak-overview-data-food-reports  

The FDA’s expanded transparency through EIS Abstracts and FOOD Reports is a positive step that gives the produce industry valuable insights to strengthen practices and demonstrate proactive engagement with regulators. At the same time, stakeholders should remain cautious: these abstracts are summaries rather than full root-cause reports, and they may not contain all the information. The best path forward is to embrace these resources as a tool for continuous improvement while carefully contextualizing their findings.