A federal-state partnership that monitors for foodborne illnesses quietly scaled back its operations nearly two months ago.
As of July 1, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) program has reduced surveillance to just two pathogens: salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told NBC News.
Before July, the program had been tracking infections caused by six additional pathogens: campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio and Yersinia. Some of them can lead to severe or life-threatening illnesses, particularly for newborns and people who are pregnant or have weakened immune systems.
Monitoring for the six pathogens is no longer required for the 10 states that participate in the program, though those states aren’t precluded from conducting surveillance on their own.
Food safety experts worry that the move, which hasn’t previously been made public, could make it harder for public health officials to understand how common foodborne illnesses are or notice whether cases are rising.
“Essentially, CDC is backing off on one of their best surveillance systems,” said Dr. J. Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. Morris, a former Agriculture Department official, was instrumental in helping create FoodNet in 1995.
FoodNet is a collaboration among the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department and 10 state health departments. Its surveillance area covers roughly 54 million people, or 16% of the U.S. population. The network includes Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee and select counties in California and New York.
“Although FoodNet will narrow its focus to Salmonella and STEC, it will maintain both its infrastructure and the quality it has come to represent,” the CDC spokesperson wrote. “Narrowing FoodNet’s reporting requirements and associated activities will allow FoodNet staff to prioritize core activities.”
A list of talking points the CDC provided to the Connecticut Public Health Department, viewed by NBC News, cites a reason for the change: “Funding has not kept pace with the resources required to maintain the continuation of FoodNet surveillance for all eight pathogens.”
The CDC spokesperson said Monday that other systems conduct national surveillance for the six pathogens that were removed from FoodNet. For instance, state health departments are still able to report cases through the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System. And the CDC’s Listeria Initiative collects reports of laboratory-confirmed cases of listeriosis — serious infections from eating food contaminated with listeria.
But FoodNet is the only surveillance system that actively looks for multiple foodborne diseases at the federal level, according to food safety experts. Other federal surveillance systems are passive, meaning the CDC relies on state health departments to notify it of cases.
Experts worry that without active surveillance of all eight pathogens, public health officials won’t be able to adequately compare trends over time or notice whether cases of a particular illness start rising. Experts also worry that scaling back FoodNet’s operations could make it harder to quickly identify and respond to outbreaks.
Barbara Kowalcyk, director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University, called the decision to reduce FoodNet surveillance “very disappointing.”
“A lot of the work that I and many, many, many, many other people have put into improving food safety over the past 20 or 30 years is just going away,” she said. Kowalcyk’s son died in 2001 of complications from a foodborne E. coli infection, and since then she has advocated for improvements to U.S. food safety policy.
Kowalcyk said that the federal budget for food safety hasn’t kept up with the cost of inflation and that cuts to federal funding for state health departments have most likely made it harder to maintain FoodNet surveillance. The CDC requested a $72 million budget for food safety for the 2026 fiscal year, about the same as it has requested in years past.
Morris said he worries that paring down FoodNet could pave the way for a rollback of food safety regulations under the Trump administration.
“If you want to make foodborne disease go away, then don’t look for foodborne disease. And then you can cheerfully eliminate all of your foodborne disease regulations. My concern is that that is the path down which we appear to be heading,” he said.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement: “The health and safety of the American people is the Administration’s utmost priority. USDA, HHS, FDA, and the CDC will continue to cooperate and maintain the highest vigilance to safeguard our food supply against pathogens.”
It’s not entirely clear how the changes to FoodNet are affecting surveillance on the state level so far. Morris said it will come down to whether states can finance it without CDC funding.
The Oregon and Connecticut health departments said they were aware of the changes as of Monday. Meanwhile, the Georgia Public Health Department said Friday that it hadn’t received any official notice from the CDC. And the New Mexico Health Department said it was awaiting notification from the CDC to determine the scope of its future surveillance.
The Maryland Health Department said the state’s health care providers and clinical laboratories are required to report cases of all eight pathogens monitored by FoodNet, so the reporting will continue “regardless of changes to the FoodNet network.”
But the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said it will need to scale back active surveillance activities for some pathogens if funding is decreased in 2026.
