Welcome back to our final installment covering the June 4 release of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Foodborne Disease Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG) estimates. In our past newsletters, we covered why the global estimates matter, and what new estimates were included. This final story addresses who might be interested in these estimates.
In our interview with Dr. Sandra Hoffman, she shared that students can learn a great deal from studying the Global Burden of Foodborne Disease papers. Systematic reviews were heavily relied on in developing the estimates, demonstrating the importance of research synthesis in building the foundation for understanding the broader impacts of disease.
Developing these estimates is challenging, and researchers often need to find reliable yet varied ways to collect information. Integrating data collected through different methodologies is difficult and requires innovative thinking to build a coherent comparison of disease across jurisdictions with varying surveillance capacity. Students can learn new methods for data collection, interpretation, and application — most notably the use of structured expert elicitation as a substitute for modelers' individual judgments when filling major data gaps, in this case, estimates of the role of food as an exposure route.
Nonprofits and others working on food safety — particularly as a global health issue in the global south — can use the results of this work to make the case for investing in food safety initiatives. Productivity loss estimates were included at the request of country and regional staff working on food safety, to help communicate the impact of foodborne illness to those outside public health who may be making budgetary decisions. The 2025 estimates include national-level estimates for the first time, reflecting WHO's goal of giving countries information they can use to set priorities in their food safety and broader public health programs.