Yummy In The Tummy

The CDC just gutted a program that tracked foodborne illness across the country. Translation: we are about to know a lot less about what makes us sick. This program, FoodNet, collected real data from hospitals, labs, and state health departments to figure out which bugs were spreading and where. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave us something rare in public health—evidence instead of guesswork. Now it’s being cut down to the studs.

The official line is that the money ran out. That’s always the line. Budgets are “tight,” Congress didn’t renew funding, priorities shifted. Meanwhile, foodborne illness still sends more than a hundred thousand Americans to the hospital every year and kills thousands. Cutting FoodNet doesn’t change those numbers. It just blinds us to them.

Here’s what happens without this data. Outbreaks spread longer before anyone connects the dots. Consumers get sick from contaminated products that stay on the shelves. Companies keep plausible deniability because there’s no watchdog catching patterns. Researchers lose the ability to study trends over time. The public gets left with vague warnings like “some ground beef might be unsafe” instead of targeted recalls. We go backward.

What makes it worse is that this rollback comes after years of progress. We actually had tools in place that worked. Now we’re choosing ignorance because it’s cheaper. Imagine if NASA decided to save money by shutting down weather satellites. Sure, the storms would still come. We’d just get hit without warning.

The timing tracks with a broader American habit of treating public health like an afterthought. We care during crises, then gut the infrastructure once attention fades. The result is predictable: more preventable hospitalizations, more economic fallout, more families blindsided.

You want to know why public trust in institutions keeps collapsing? This. People see agencies abandoning their own missions while corporations profit off the chaos. And once again, patients and consumers pay the price.

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SOURCE ➡️ https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/wireStory/cdc-dramatically-scales-back-program-tracks-food-poisoning-125040287