Developing a Food Protection Rapid Response Team (RRT) (U18)

The goal of these cooperative agreements is to facilitate long-term improvements to the national integrated food safety system by unifying and coordinating federal/state/local food/feed emergency response efforts including: 1) Strengthening the link among epidemiology, lab and environmental health/regulatory components; 2) Improving States' regulatory and surveillance food/feed protection programs to include using Incident Command System (ICS)/National Incident Management System (NIMS) principles and a Unified Command structure to conduct integrated responses to all-hazards food/feed emergencies, rapidly identifying and removing tainted food from commerce, and conducting root cause investigations to inform future prevention efforts; and 3) Addressing supporting components, such as training, data sharing, data analysis, communications, continuous process improvement, and development of best practices and other resources to support national capacity/capability development. This will be accomplished through the provision of funding to support development of multi-jurisdictional, multi-disciplinary Rapid Response Teams (RRTs) and will require extensive cooperation and coordination with FDA District Offices and other FDA program offices.