Congratulations to Dr. Scott Kenney, PhD for being elected to serve as Secretary of the NC1202 Enteric Diseases of Food Animals multistate project group during CRWAD 2024.
The long-term goal of this collaborative, multistate project is to develop strategies to prevent and control enteric diseases of livestock and poultry, ultimately to decrease incidence of enteric diseases in food animals, and zoonotic gastroenteritis in humans. Illnesses caused by enteric pathogens of animal origin (foodborne or zoonotic pathogens) continue to remain a prominent public health challenge in the USA (https://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/dfwed/edeb/). Despite many concerted efforts to control enteric pathogens as well as zoonotic pathogens in food animals at both on-farm (pre-harvest) and food processing (post-harvest) environments, the incidence of enteric diseases of animals and food and water-borne illnesses of humans remains high, and some are increasing. Nevertheless, a broad range of education and research-driven and practice-oriented control efforts have succeeded in controlling the incidence of key food-borne pathogens at low levels. NC1202 originally started as NC62 in the 1960’s and has been an important contributor to research on the enteric diseases of swine. Over the last 20 years, the enteric diseases group has contributed significantly to an evolved and expanded effort to find evidence-based interventions to prevent enteric diseases in food animals and food-borne diseases in humans. The group remains committed to the prevention and control of animal and human diseases caused by enteric pathogens. A primary avenue for control is decreasing carriage and disease due to enteric pathogens in food animals. The group's collaborative efforts harmonize with the recent government-wide initiative to better understand, characterize, and mitigate antimicrobial resistance (AMR) across the food chain. Their proactive and collaborative efforts will also contribute to national goals to further decrease the burden of foodborne illness by the year 2030 (https://www.healthypeople.gov/).