IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0151977.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

FoodChain-Lab: A Trace-Back and Trace-Forward Tool Developed and Applied during Food-Borne Disease Outbreak Investigations in Germany and Europe

Author

Listed:
  • Armin A Weiser
  • Christian Thöns
  • Matthias Filter
  • Alexander Falenski
  • Bernd Appel
  • Annemarie Käsbohrer

Abstract

FoodChain-Lab is modular open-source software for trace-back and trace-forward analysis in food-borne disease outbreak investigations. Development of FoodChain-Lab has been driven by a need for appropriate software in several food-related outbreaks in Germany since 2011. The software allows integrated data management, data linkage, enrichment and visualization as well as interactive supply chain analyses. Identification of possible outbreak sources or vehicles is facilitated by calculation of tracing scores for food-handling stations (companies or persons) and food products under investigation. The software also supports consideration of station-specific cross-contamination, analysis of geographical relationships, and topological clustering of the tracing network structure. FoodChain-Lab has been applied successfully in previous outbreak investigations, for example during the 2011 EHEC outbreak and the 2013/14 European hepatitis A outbreak. The software is most useful in complex, multi-area outbreak investigations where epidemiological evidence may be insufficient to discriminate between multiple implicated food products. The automated analysis and visualization components would be of greater value if trading information on food ingredients and compound products was more easily available.

Suggested Citation

  • Armin A Weiser & Christian Thöns & Matthias Filter & Alexander Falenski & Bernd Appel & Annemarie Käsbohrer, 2016. "FoodChain-Lab: A Trace-Back and Trace-Forward Tool Developed and Applied during Food-Borne Disease Outbreak Investigations in Germany and Europe," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(3), pages 1-11, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0151977
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151977
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151977
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151977&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0151977?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0151977. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.