Decision Tool for Assessing the Likelihood of an Intentional Foodborne Illness Outbreak

Outbreaks of foodborne illnesses are frequent, but intentional cases are rare. Authorities dealing with suspected intentional foodborne illness outbreaks need a decision support tool to help distinguish accidental or natural outbreaks from intentional cases. Two broad discrimination models are available that cover biological warfare agents but these are not fully relevant to the scale and nature of intentional foodborne illness outbreaks. Two new models are proposed, one involving a scoring system, evaluated on total points, and another based on a Bayesian Network. The Bayesian Network model is more complex, but deals with uncertainty explicitly. The two proposed models are demonstrated by assessing four known outbreaks, two intentional and two accidental.