Commonground
Senior Moderator
SPRING 2026
Issue 1
Protecting the United States food supply from pathogens and contaminants that cause foodborne illness has long been a multiagency effort at the federal level, with state and local health departments contributing to the investigation of, and response to, foodborne outbreaks. Today, as more human and animal foods are made with globally sourced ingredients, public health laboratories play an increasingly critical role in protecting food safety through testing innovations and collaborations that can help detect foodborne threats to US consumers and stop outbreaks before they start.
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An Emerging Workforce
Investing in sophisticated technologies to test for foodborne pathogens also requires investing in a trained laboratory workforce. Poates said most international laboratories she has worked with now have a sequencer.
“The difficulty is that they may not have the infrastructure to support data that comes off the instrument or the epidemiological experts to analyze and interpret data,” she says. PulseNet International trains international laboratories on sequencing instrumentation and on equipment that may have been purchased for respiratory virus surveillance that can also be leveraged for enteric surveillance.
Domestically, Oakeson has seen a workforce divide between bioinformatics experts and wet lab scientists. “I think you can do both,” he said. “That’s a bridge we’re trying to build on the workforce development side. It’s our job to take wet lab scientists and train them on how to do bioinformatics. Now, we’re adding the genomic epidemiology component too.”
Urban says the Public Health Laboratory Fellowship Program: an APHL-CDC Initiative has helped him meet emerging workforce needs in his laboratory.
“I’ve mentored 12 different fellows each for two-year appointments over the last three years,” he said. “I have people at the bench who are amazing and love what they do. Seven out of the 70 scientists I have here are APHL fellows. The program is an excellent way to increase workforce when funding decreases and to bring new laboratorians into public health.”
Another benefit of developing a food safety workforce is that these laboratory skills are broadly useful, according to Poates.
“One of the reasons this work is so important is because the wet laboratory, bioinformatics and epidemiology skills laboratories are trained in for food safety are transferrable to other pathogens,” she said. “This enhances overall pandemic preparedness greatly and encourages lab-epi communication, which is important in all forms of outbreak response. Even though we might be focused on foodborne pathogen capacity-building efforts, we’re building global pandemic preparedness and global health security.”
continued: https://aphl.org/our-publications/s...--protecting-the-food-supply-for-us-consumers
Issue 1
Protecting the United States food supply from pathogens and contaminants that cause foodborne illness has long been a multiagency effort at the federal level, with state and local health departments contributing to the investigation of, and response to, foodborne outbreaks. Today, as more human and animal foods are made with globally sourced ingredients, public health laboratories play an increasingly critical role in protecting food safety through testing innovations and collaborations that can help detect foodborne threats to US consumers and stop outbreaks before they start.
-snip-
An Emerging Workforce
Investing in sophisticated technologies to test for foodborne pathogens also requires investing in a trained laboratory workforce. Poates said most international laboratories she has worked with now have a sequencer.
“The difficulty is that they may not have the infrastructure to support data that comes off the instrument or the epidemiological experts to analyze and interpret data,” she says. PulseNet International trains international laboratories on sequencing instrumentation and on equipment that may have been purchased for respiratory virus surveillance that can also be leveraged for enteric surveillance.
Domestically, Oakeson has seen a workforce divide between bioinformatics experts and wet lab scientists. “I think you can do both,” he said. “That’s a bridge we’re trying to build on the workforce development side. It’s our job to take wet lab scientists and train them on how to do bioinformatics. Now, we’re adding the genomic epidemiology component too.”
Urban says the Public Health Laboratory Fellowship Program: an APHL-CDC Initiative has helped him meet emerging workforce needs in his laboratory.
“I’ve mentored 12 different fellows each for two-year appointments over the last three years,” he said. “I have people at the bench who are amazing and love what they do. Seven out of the 70 scientists I have here are APHL fellows. The program is an excellent way to increase workforce when funding decreases and to bring new laboratorians into public health.”
Another benefit of developing a food safety workforce is that these laboratory skills are broadly useful, according to Poates.
“One of the reasons this work is so important is because the wet laboratory, bioinformatics and epidemiology skills laboratories are trained in for food safety are transferrable to other pathogens,” she said. “This enhances overall pandemic preparedness greatly and encourages lab-epi communication, which is important in all forms of outbreak response. Even though we might be focused on foodborne pathogen capacity-building efforts, we’re building global pandemic preparedness and global health security.”
continued: https://aphl.org/our-publications/s...--protecting-the-food-supply-for-us-consumers