You're listening to Taking Stock with Kathleen Hays and Pim Fox on Bloomberg Radio. Imagine a food born illness that is trackable back to its source. Well, the Centers for Disease Control. It's releasing a new food safety tool. It's called pulse Net two point oh and it enables state laboratories in order to harness the whole genome sequencing. And what that would allow you to do is detect the bacterial pathogen. This sort of d n A fingerprint. Well, in addition to it being science, it also has a
lot to do with potential litigation. Steve Seller is a legal editor for Bloomberg b n A based in Arlington, Virginia. B n A a Holy owned subsidy of Bloomberg, leading source of legal, regulatory and business information for professionals. They have authoritative coverage on such legal areas as tax and accounting, labor and employment, healthcare, privacy data, and so on. Steve, thank you very much for being here. Glad to be here. So tell us about this test. This is the new
sort of fingerprint DNA fingerprint test. The test at once cost I read a hundred million dollars. Now it costs about a thousand dollars and it's going down to maybe five or fifty bucks. It's a really big development both for food safety but also for the litigation, as you mentioned, because one of the things that does is it does, as you said, it's a fingerprint matches a victim or suspected victim of a food brioless outbreak with a potential source. And when it's as the CDC says, it's, it's like
match twins, identical twins. And so it takes out a lot of what they called the gumshoe epidemiology where they had to go to the food source, the restaurant, whatever and try to match these things. So they get a very quick match, and it's really helpful in these large outbreak cases, so they know what they're dealing with. Now
there's the is the testing of the test. Is a science behind this firm enough deep enough that if it is used as the basis for some kind of suit in court that it will be little stand up to a defense attorney saying, hey, there's lots of researchers, lots of tests. This one isn't perfect either. That's gonna be something that's gonna be developed the pintif lawyers that talked to said that it does have to be tested in court.
Um even so, it's it's kind of hard, as the defense attorney said, to challenge the FDA or the CDC when they have what they call a linked case, when they've they've made this clear match. But that will certainly be something that's subject litigation, and there'll be a lot of questions about be answered, just like any scientific test
that gets into litigation. So this could have been used, for example, in the case of Bluebell ice cream or even package salads from Dull Right, those listeria outbreaks, yes, and that's where it's being used. It's potentially being rolled out to other kinds of contamination salmonella, E. Coli and and uh and and and the other basically other microbial contaminants.
So uh yeah, the sense I got from the lawyers that it's going to be used more broadly, and what that does is it builds updated It's not only for food safety, but also for the lawyers that are going
to contest those cases. So if you go to a restaurant you get definitely ill because of salmonella, and you sue, your lawyer will now potentially have that data, and it will fortify the case to say, well, we have this match CDC and the FDA said so, and that will be beneficial to plaintiffs at least that's what the lawyers
tell me. Steve Chippotle. As a matter of fact, I was sitting at my desk this morning before before noon, and three guys had come to lunch with us, and the other guy said, Chippotle, what do you guys have a death wish? What would this mean for Chippotle? Well, I think it's not just Chipotle. I think it's any industry. And you just go to the CDC website, you'll see
all kinds of investigations are going on. And that's what brings in the other development here, and that's the Food Safety Modernization Act, and it's basically preventative measures so that government and potentially lawyers don't have to follow up this these kinds of outbreaks with litigation preventing as opposed to responding.
So it'll set a new standard for companies like Chippotle and Dull Vegetables and and Little Bail and other companies that are undergoing this kind of scrutiny right now, Steve sellers. Thank you so very much. Legal editor for Bloomberg b n A talking to us about the latest when it comes to detecting pathogens that could lead to serious food board illnesses.