As if the body count and illness from Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policies won’t be bad enough, he’s also undermining food safety (boldface mine):

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.

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.”

…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.

Listeria, while relatively rare, has a high mortality rate (single to double digits, depending on who gets infected). Pulling back on Listeria monitoring is especially bad.

When E. coli causes an outbreak, much of the time it’s pretty straightforward: people ate Aunt Edna’s potato salad, and then everybody barfs. These are relatively easy to track: people will sometimes say things like, “I thought it smelled bad, but I decided to eat it anyway.” It’s easy for investigators to ask what have you eaten in the last 48 hours, and determine what things in common people ate. Sometimes, people haven’t even thrown away the contaminated food.

But with Listeria, the length of time to disease onset, which can be up to three weeks, makes the epidemiology much harder: can you tell me every ingredient you had in your dinner from thirteen days ago? Obviously, contaminated food is less likely to be saved for 13 days too.

Listeria outbreaks also are typically longer-term–a food processing plant that has contamination which, every so often, results in contaminated food, over a period of months or years. Given these difficulties, one of the key ways to link Listeria infections back to a single source is through molecular methods, such as genome sequencing. A single case in one state might appear to be a random event and there would be no reason to link it to other cases in other states. But if we see multiple cases in multiple states that are genetically identical, now we know we have an outbreak scenario from a single source, rather than just a bunch of random ‘one off’ events in various states.

The interstate surveillance is absolutely critical for identifying outbreaks linked back to food processing, and as CDC scales back on this, leading to states dropping out (the article mentions at least one state has done so), we could lose critical data required to trace very difficult to track outbreaks.

The historical irony is that genomic surveillance of food borne infections by the U.S. government initially focused on Listeria as it was thought it would have a dramatic effect (and it did!).

Anyway, this is one more reason why Kennedy should either resign or be impeached.