Abstract
Every year in Canada, approximately one in eight individuals experience some type of domestically acquired foodborne disease. With contaminated meats causing a large proportion of these illnesses, it is important to decrease the health burden caused by these products. In order to achieve this goal, the identification and proportion of the risk of these products need to be assessed so more effective and efficient mitigation strategies can be put in place. As a result, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) created the Establishment-based Risk Assessment (ERA) model which is an expert elicitation (EE) derived source attribution (SA) model for the most prominent foodborne pathogens in Canada. To assess the validity of the EE SA estimates, the goal of the practicum was to compare the ERA SA estimates with samples containing meat sub-product pathogen combinations collected by PHAC and CFIA. To facilitate the comparison, the PHAC and CFIA data sets were cleaned and combined to improve sampling sizes. After which, the prevalence of disease was calculated for Salmonella spp, E. Coli O157, Campylobacter spp., and L. monocytogenes and compared to the EE SA estimates by both descriptive and statistical analysis. Descriptive analysis looked at trends in pathogens and sub-products tested across the reporting period for the combined data sets, and statistical analysis assessed the correlation between the prevalence and EE SA data. This statistical comparison was facilitated by spearman correlation and the Mann Whitney U test. However, despite the best efforts to manipulate the data to provide meaningful results, small sample sizes led to statistical analysis providing invalid results and thus, future directions of the data are discussed.