FEATURE
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 capacitybuilding efforts, we’ re building global pandemic preparedness and global health security.”
Funding Food Safety
The laboratory results critical to maintaining a robust food safety system require significant resources. Yet federal and state agencies often face spending constraints that affect these resources. FDA’ s Laboratory Flexible Funding Model( LFFM)— first announced in 2020— has allowed some public health laboratories like MDH to further invest in protecting food safety.“ In our case, there were 14 possible projects across microbiology, chemistry and radiochemistry,” Urban said.“ We were funded for all but one of them. Now, all the disciplines we use in environmental testing, we can apply to food safety.”
Urban says LFFM funding for MDH continues.“ We couldn’ t do what we do without this grant; even with shrinking budgets, my view is we should be doing more, not less, because public health demands it,” he said.“ I feel my role as one of the recipients of this grant is to hand wins to FDA, so they can go to Congress and get more funding. I come from academia, where you almost never get a grant without showing preliminary data. That’ s the model I’ ve adopted in public health. We are always doing more.”
As an environmental sciences laboratory, most of Urban’ s work is testing air, water and food samples. His lab responds to outbreaks and illnesses, but“ what we really want to do is prevent harmful exposures before they happen. We do surveillance testing of products already on store shelves for a variety of threats
The ability to link and have confidence in the attribution to a particular outbreak or case has meant we can solve outbreaks we hadn’ t been able to before.”
— Donald A. Prater, DVM
that could be present,” he said.“ We went from testing a few hundred samples per year to testing about 2,000 samples.”
Testing products before isolates from ill people are sequenced is a shift from approaches that test products only after people become ill.“ We have the funding and the mandate to do it,” Urban said.“ If we can find pathogens before people get sick, that’ s worthwhile and it’ s what we should be doing. You can quantify how much we’ re saving in emergency room costs and show that this is a good investment. But you can only do that if you have data.”
Demonstrating results— and telling the stories of the critical work done by public health laboratories— is a key component of the funding puzzle.
“ We saw a reduction in the amount of funding we usually get for food safety activities in our most recent award from CDC,” Oakeson said.“ We had to scramble to find ways to make up for those shortcomings because we don’ t get a lot of support from state tax dollars. We used different funding mechanisms to fill in and make sure we can keep doing what we do to keep the food supply safe.”
Oakeson and his colleagues have also implemented strategies to help stretch laboratory resources.“ In Utah, we’ ve validated the ability to use a quarter of the volume of reagents needed for sequencing,” he said.“ Previously, a reagent kit would be good for about 96 samples, but we now use that same kit and test 384 samples. We’ ve been able to get more bang for our buck by using innovative techniques. We’ ve shared those procedures and protocols with other public health labs across the nation so they can see those same cost savings.”
Sharing results and methodologies, and training together, has helped refine how state, federal and international laboratories work together.
“ We ' re getting better at what we do,” said Prater.“ It doesn ' t mean we don ' t have a need for additional resources. We ' re always advocating to make sure we have sufficient resources, not only for FDA laboratories but for our state partners as well.”
Oakeson says he’ s constantly looking to improve the efficiency of laboratory processes. Consolidating workflows is one area of focus.“ If I can do one set of workflows in the laboratory to get my sequence data generated and prevent the need for additional workflows on the data analysis side, that helps my data scientists do that work as simply and as streamlined as possible,” he said. The update of CDC’ s PulseNet to PulseNet 2.0, with its cloud-based solution for data analysis, has also improved efficiency, according to Oakeson.
Process improvements have helped public health laboratories meet the evergrowing demands of protecting the US food supply, even as available resources dwindle.“ There’ s always a new pathogen or virus that we need to address, but funding rarely increases,” he said.
That’ s because public health works well in the background.“ We need to keep public health and food safety at the forefront of people’ s minds,” Oakeson says.“ It’ s important that people know what we’ re doing and how we’ re protecting them.” g
16 LAB MATTERS Spring 2026 PublicHealthLabs @ APHL. org
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