The Rapid Response Teams (RRT) Computer-to-Computer/Sea-to-Sea (C2C) Annual Meeting was held December 1-3, 2020. This year’s theme was “Sailing into a new decade of human and animal food rapid response excellence”, and many meeting components followed the nautical theme. Each RRT was responsible for creating their own poster highlighting their work in 2020 along with a quick video explanation, a signal flag to represent their team, a team photo, and a brief team introduction. The meeting was hosted on a virtual platform called Pathable, and each RRT had their own webpage where their content was posted, along with a discussion forum where attendees could send messages and discuss poster and other meeting content. Over the 3 days, a total of 562 people attended sessions from 24 Rapid Response Teams, representing many state, federal, and local authorities.
Presentations provided diverse perspectives on several large or notable multi-state outbreaks, including:
· Peeling Back the Layers: Salmonella Newport/Red Onions Multi-State Outbreak
· Lettuce Romaine Calm: STEC/Romaine Multi-State Outbreaks, Fall 2019
· There’s More Than Fungus Among Us: Listeria monocytogenes/Enoki Mushrooms Multi-State Outbreak
There were also presentations on RRTs responding to COVID clusters linked to food facilities, as well as responding to natural disasters and other incidents during COVID, as well as presentations on single-state and smaller foodborne outbreaks and other human and animal food contamination events. During the roundtables session, attendees could engage in up to 5 unique small group discussions with subject matter experts on a range of response topics, including: Reportable Food Registry, FDA-state recall shadowing project, FSIS use of state lab results, emergency response training, information sharing, FBI Crim-Epi workshop, and the role of whole genome sequencing during outbreak investigations.
Screenshots from the 2020 RRT Website:
