Speaker 1: You're listening to Taking Stock with Kathleen Hays and Pim
Speaker 1: Fox on Bloomberg Radio. Imagine a food born illness that
Speaker 1: is trackable back to its source. Well, the Centers for
Speaker 1: Disease Control. It's releasing a new food safety tool. It's
Speaker 1: called pulse Net two point oh and it enables state
Speaker 1: laboratories in order to harness the whole genome sequencing. And
Speaker 1: what that would allow you to do is detect the
Speaker 1: bacterial pathogen. This sort of d n A fingerprint. Well,
Speaker 1: in addition to it being science, it also has a
Speaker 1: lot to do with potential litigation. Steve Seller is a
Speaker 1: legal editor for Bloomberg b n A based in Arlington, Virginia.
Speaker 1: B n A a Holy owned subsidy of Bloomberg, leading
Speaker 1: source of legal, regulatory and business information for professionals. They
Speaker 1: have authoritative coverage on such legal areas as tax and accounting,
Speaker 1: labor and employment, healthcare, privacy data, and so on. Steve,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for being here. Glad to be here.
Speaker 1: So tell us about this test. This is the new
Speaker 1: sort of fingerprint DNA fingerprint test. The test at once
Speaker 1: cost I read a hundred million dollars. Now it costs
Speaker 1: about a thousand dollars and it's going down to maybe
Speaker 1: five or fifty bucks. It's a really big development both
Speaker 1: for food safety but also for the litigation, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: because one of the things that does is it does,
Speaker 1: as you said, it's a fingerprint matches a victim or
Speaker 1: suspected victim of a food brioless outbreak with a potential source.
Speaker 1: And when it's as the CDC says, it's, it's like
Speaker 1: match twins, identical twins. And so it takes out a
Speaker 1: lot of what they called the gumshoe epidemiology where they
Speaker 1: had to go to the food source, the restaurant, whatever
Speaker 1: and try to match these things. So they get a
Speaker 1: very quick match, and it's really helpful in these large
Speaker 1: outbreak cases, so they know what they're dealing with. Now
Speaker 1: there's the is the testing of the test. Is a
Speaker 1: science behind this firm enough deep enough that if it
Speaker 1: is used as the basis for some kind of suit
Speaker 1: in court that it will be little stand up to
Speaker 1: a defense attorney saying, hey, there's lots of researchers, lots
Speaker 1: of tests. This one isn't perfect either. That's gonna be
Speaker 1: something that's gonna be developed the pintif lawyers that talked
Speaker 1: to said that it does have to be tested in court.
Speaker 1: Um even so, it's it's kind of hard, as the
Speaker 1: defense attorney said, to challenge the FDA or the CDC
Speaker 1: when they have what they call a linked case, when
Speaker 1: they've they've made this clear match. But that will certainly
Speaker 1: be something that's subject litigation, and there'll be a lot
Speaker 1: of questions about be answered, just like any scientific test
Speaker 1: that gets into litigation. So this could have been used,
Speaker 1: for example, in the case of Bluebell ice cream or
Speaker 1: even package salads from Dull Right, those listeria outbreaks, yes,
Speaker 1: and that's where it's being used. It's potentially being rolled
Speaker 1: out to other kinds of contamination salmonella, E. Coli and
Speaker 1: and uh and and and the other basically other microbial contaminants.
Speaker 1: So uh yeah, the sense I got from the lawyers
Speaker 1: that it's going to be used more broadly, and what
Speaker 1: that does is it builds updated It's not only for
Speaker 1: food safety, but also for the lawyers that are going
Speaker 1: to contest those cases. So if you go to a
Speaker 1: restaurant you get definitely ill because of salmonella, and you sue,
Speaker 1: your lawyer will now potentially have that data, and it
Speaker 1: will fortify the case to say, well, we have this
Speaker 1: match CDC and the FDA said so, and that will
Speaker 1: be beneficial to plaintiffs at least that's what the lawyers
Speaker 1: tell me. Steve Chippotle. As a matter of fact, I
Speaker 1: was sitting at my desk this morning before before noon,
Speaker 1: and three guys had come to lunch with us, and
Speaker 1: the other guy said, Chippotle, what do you guys have
Speaker 1: a death wish? What would this mean for Chippotle? Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's not just Chipotle. I think it's any industry.
Speaker 1: And you just go to the CDC website, you'll see
Speaker 1: all kinds of investigations are going on. And that's what
Speaker 1: brings in the other development here, and that's the Food
Speaker 1: Safety Modernization Act, and it's basically preventative measures so that
Speaker 1: government and potentially lawyers don't have to follow up this
Speaker 1: these kinds of outbreaks with litigation preventing as opposed to responding.
Speaker 1: So it'll set a new standard for companies like Chippotle
Speaker 1: and Dull Vegetables and and Little Bail and other companies
Speaker 1: that are undergoing this kind of scrutiny right now, Steve sellers.
Speaker 1: Thank you so very much. Legal editor for Bloomberg b
Speaker 1: n A talking to us about the latest when it
Speaker 1: comes to detecting pathogens that could lead to serious food
Speaker 1: board illnesses.