Will budget cuts spell the end for "Team D"?
Jun 24, 2011 10:36 AM
A couple of years ago we told you about Team D - the D stands for diarrhea - a remarkable team of graduate students at the University of Minnesota who are more like the A-Team when it comes to finding the causes of food-borne illness outbreaks such as E. coli and salmonella.
But now Team D is in danger of becoming victims themselves, facing big cutbacks or a possible shutdown beginning June 30 due to budget deadlock between Minnesota governor Mark Dayton and the state’s legislature.
The ramifications of such cutbacks or a shutdown would go well beyond the borders of the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
Team D played a vital role in figuring out that jalapeño peppers were behind a nationwide outbreak of salmonella in the summer of 2008, accurately contradicting the best guesses of federal food-safety officials that tomatoes were the likely source. In early 2009, Team D played a similarly critical role in identifying institutional jars of peanut butter as the source of a cluster of salmonella cases in Minnesota, a finding that ultimately led to one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history by the Peanut Corporation of America.
When 80 people from 31 states got E. coli, it was Team D that traced it back to specific batches of raw cookie dough from Nestlé USA. The company subsequently recalled 3.6 million packages of cookie dough.
Although revered in public-health circles, the secret of Team D’s success isn’t complicated. The students lose no time getting on the phone with every person in the state who has reported contracting a food-borne illness, quizzing them about what they ate and where they ate it in the days before they became ill. That information is immediately sent to epidemiologists and other disease-detecting experts at the Minnesota Department of Health, which operates one of the top labs in the country for fingerprinting the DNA of viruses.
The lab issues daily reports to the state’s epidemiologists, comparing the results to other cases both within Minnesota and nationally. The scientists look for clusters and patterns that could indicate an outbreak.
The graduate students from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health who form Team D are paid by the state health department. Minnesota Department of Health spokesman John Steiger says Team D’s operations will most likely be severely curtailed unless the governor and legislature get together on a budget deal before a July 1 deadline.
“Everything is really up in the air and nobody really knows what is going to happen with the budget,” says Steiger. “We’re hoping for the best.”
—Bob WilliamsBut now Team D is in danger of becoming victims themselves, facing big cutbacks or a possible shutdown beginning June 30 due to budget deadlock between Minnesota governor Mark Dayton and the state’s legislature.
The ramifications of such cutbacks or a shutdown would go well beyond the borders of the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
Team D played a vital role in figuring out that jalapeño peppers were behind a nationwide outbreak of salmonella in the summer of 2008, accurately contradicting the best guesses of federal food-safety officials that tomatoes were the likely source. In early 2009, Team D played a similarly critical role in identifying institutional jars of peanut butter as the source of a cluster of salmonella cases in Minnesota, a finding that ultimately led to one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history by the Peanut Corporation of America.
When 80 people from 31 states got E. coli, it was Team D that traced it back to specific batches of raw cookie dough from Nestlé USA. The company subsequently recalled 3.6 million packages of cookie dough.
Although revered in public-health circles, the secret of Team D’s success isn’t complicated. The students lose no time getting on the phone with every person in the state who has reported contracting a food-borne illness, quizzing them about what they ate and where they ate it in the days before they became ill. That information is immediately sent to epidemiologists and other disease-detecting experts at the Minnesota Department of Health, which operates one of the top labs in the country for fingerprinting the DNA of viruses.
The lab issues daily reports to the state’s epidemiologists, comparing the results to other cases both within Minnesota and nationally. The scientists look for clusters and patterns that could indicate an outbreak.
The graduate students from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health who form Team D are paid by the state health department. Minnesota Department of Health spokesman John Steiger says Team D’s operations will most likely be severely curtailed unless the governor and legislature get together on a budget deal before a July 1 deadline.
“Everything is really up in the air and nobody really knows what is going to happen with the budget,” says Steiger. “We’re hoping for the best.”
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