Reward cards: Sales gimmick or life savers?

Do you have a customer loyalty card from a grocery store in your wallet? You might want one after you read this.

Aside from any financial benefits, such a card could spare you a devastating illness caused by tainted food. That's one of the prevention strategies recommended in a new federal report analyzing big food-borne disease outbreaks.

Having a loyalty card makes it easier for a retailer to track you down and warn you if a food you bought from that store has been implicated in a disease outbreak.

It's not foolproof. Maybe the warning came too late and you have already eaten the food. But in many cases, people still have recalled food in their refrigerator, freezer or pantry.

Reward-card data can also be used to track down which food made people sick. People often forget what they've eaten in the past few days or weeks, but that information is preserved in member records.

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden, said Tuesday that Costco, for example, has used its member card list to notify customers when a product they purchased has been recalled. Food-safety officials hope more retailers will begin offering such reward programs.

They also hope the food industry will begin keeping better records. Detailed shipping documents help disease investigators trace foods more quickly from their source to their final destination.

Retailers can also use their influence on suppliers to reduce potential contamination. Frieden said Walmart worked with the federal government to create new standards for its poultry suppliers to reduce the risk of salmonella contamination.

Investigators still don't know what food caused the recent outbreak of E. coli cases linked to Chipotle Mexican restaurants in the Pacific Northwest, Frieden said. Chipotle has closed dozens of its restaurants in Washington state and Oregon while the company tries to determine the source of contamination.

This is Chipotle's third outbreak of food-borne illness this year. The chain was linked to a big norovirus outbreak at one of its California stores in August. That same month, more than 60 people in Minnesota got sick from salmonella-tainted tomatoes that were used in a number of Twin Cities Chipotle locations.

Such clusters of outbreaks are unusual. Once this latest outbreak is settled, FDA officials want to meet with Chipotle executives to discuss what practices might be contributing to the trouble.

According to the CDC, multi-state disease outbreaks have been increasing and tend to be more lethal. They account for only 3 percent of all food-borne disease outbreaks but more than half of all related deaths.

That may be just because germs involved in multi-state outbreaks are more likely to be deadly. The three most common pathogens in these cases are salmonella, E. coli and listeria. These germs can be transferred with food directly from the farm, or they can contaminate food as it goes through unsanitary production facilities. Consolidation in the food industry means that fewer players are supplying the food, making it more likely that a tainted product will be distributed widely and make more people sick.

When outbreaks occur, investigators have better technology than they once did to track them. They can look at the DNA fingerprint of many of these germs and determine whether an outbreak in Minnesota is linked to one in California.

Across the country, though, food-safety surveillance efforts are spotty. Some states report very few disease outbreaks — not because they don't have many, but because they lack the staff to investigate them. Minnesota has a fairly robust surveillance system through the state Health Department, which partners with a group of U of M students dubbed "Team Diarrhea." The students have identified a lot of food outbreaks here, and many national clusters too.

But critics of U.S. food-safety policy say you really need such a coordinated approach in every state to minimize the damage from outbreaks. And the funding just hasn't been there, for that or for many other food-safety initiatives.