Marler Clark Epidemiologist Patti Waller gives a video demo of OutbreakDatabase.com

Outbreak Database Transcript

A video demo of http://www.outbreakdatabase.com by Marler Clark epidemiologist Patti Waller.

Patti Waller: The outbreak database was created to compliment a website put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Here is our foodborne Illness Outbreak Database. All the fields that you see -- keywords, organism, month, year, vehicle, state, country -- can be searched. The organisms come as a drop-down list, so you would select an organism that you're interested in, for example, Salmonella.

If you wanted to see Salmonella outbreaks linked to eggs, you would type 'egg' as a keyword (or vehicle). Scroll down until you come to the search button, click it, and you'll see a listing of egg-Salmonella outbreaks. You'll see the year of the outbreak and some more information. If you want to find out more about a specific outbreak, you simply click on the title and you'll come up with a description of the outbreak. You can see when the outbreak began, the states affected in this particular outbreak, and more.

Now let's say we wanted to see about E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks that have occurred, for example, in 2010. You come to the organism list, check E. coli, come down to the year and enter the year of interest --in our case 2010 -- scroll down to the search button, click, and you'll see a list of E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks that have occurred since January 1st. Select the title, and you get a detailed description of the outbreak. You can see when it began—in this case February 2010, and the State -- it occurred in Washington State. The vehicle or food item was unpasteurized milk and the molecular results are unknown at this time. It was sold in retail stores and the brand name was Jackie's Jersey.

What we do is provide links to recalls, we provide data source references, which is another unique feature of our database. I do believe that at Marler Clark we provide a service. I like to think that we're a continuation of public health.

For more information visit http://www.Marlerclark.com and http://www.outbreakdatabase.com.

Marler Clark, the Food Safety Law Firm.

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