WHO Releases New Surveillance Playbook to Boost INFOSAN’s Front Line Against Global Food Safety Emergencies

This integration enables more robust risk assessments and strengthens the evidence base behind INFOSAN notifications—allowing members to make quicker, better-informed risk management decisions.

When food safety incidents cross borders, minutes and data quality matter. To help countries detect threats faster and coordinate responses more effectively, the World Health Organization (WHO) has released updated editions of its full set of manuals on foodborne disease surveillance and response—providing national authorities with practical guidance to strengthen the systems that underpin the International Food Safety Authorities Network (INFOSAN).

The manuals offer a structured, end-to-end roadmap for building reliable, integrated, and scalable surveillance systems, ensuring that food safety events identified nationally can be communicated rapidly and credibly through INFOSAN before they escalate into international emergencies.

Why Surveillance Quality Determines INFOSAN Effectiveness

Every INFOSAN alert begins at the national level. Whether a signal emerges through indicator-based surveillance, event-based reporting, laboratory findings, or field outbreak investigations, the speed, clarity, and completeness of early information shape the global response.

The updated WHO manuals explain how countries can:

• Detect signals earlier

• Verify risks more reliably

• Generate evidence that supports rapid international notification

• Share actionable intelligence through INFOSAN when cross-border risks arise

Stronger national systems mean faster, clearer, and more trusted communication across the global food safety network.

From Fragmented Signals to Integrated Evidence

A key focus of the updated guidance is integration across the food chain. The manuals describe how to connect:

• Public health surveillance

• Laboratory and microbiological data

• Environmental assessments

• Food chain and contamination monitoring

• Field investigation findings

This integration enables more robust risk assessments and strengthens the evidence base behind INFOSAN notifications—allowing members to make quicker, better-informed risk management decisions.

Practical Tools Countries Can Use Immediately

Designed for operational use, each manual includes hands-on tools that national authorities can deploy without delay:

• Self-assessment instruments to identify system gaps

• Decision trees to guide surveillance and response actions

• Templates and field investigation tools for outbreak response

• Case studies based on real-world food safety events

These tools help countries standardize approaches, improve consistency, and move from ad-hoc responses to institutionalized, sustainable surveillance systems.

Building Resilience in a Changing Risk Landscape

The updated manuals also reflect emerging global realities:

• Climate and environmental change altering foodborne risk patterns

• Increasingly complex and globalized food supply chains

• The need to transition from pilot projects to durable national surveillance arrangements

By offering typologies and staged pathways for system development, the manuals help countries design surveillance systems that are adaptable, resilient, and future-ready.

What This Means for INFOSAN

As more countries adopt the guidance:

• Unusual patterns will be detected sooner

• Emerging hazards will be assessed with greater confidence

• Contamination sources will be confirmed faster

• Information shared through INFOSAN will be clearer, more complete, and more actionable

In short, stronger national systems directly strengthen the global network.

Call to Action: Build the Systems That Protect the Network

For governments, donors, health-tech developers, laboratory-informatics providers, and food-safety innovators, the message is clear: INFOSAN is only as strong as the systems feeding it.

Early adopters are encouraged to:

• Invest in foundational surveillance capacity before crises hit

• Align digital tools with national surveillance workflows

• Prioritize interoperability across public health, food, and laboratory systems

• Introduce advanced methods only when system readiness is in place

By reinforcing the systems that generate trusted evidence, the updated WHO manuals aim to strengthen the foundation of trust, speed, and collaboration that keeps INFOSAN effective—and consumers safe—across borders.