Event Information

Event Topic:
Updated BIONews + video – How Genomic Surveillance Traces Food Poisoning

Event Description:
"Surveillance is the absolute underpinning of every single thing in medicine and in public health," Parsonnet says. She traces molecular surveillance from her CDC years, tracking Shigella in travelers returning from the Yucatan, to Lucy Tompkins's Stanford work that began molecular epidemiology. PulseNet now links cases across states by genome sequencing; one economic analysis estimated that it prevents about 280,000 Salmonella cases and saves about half a billion dollars each year. Yet, she says, only about 1% of people in a Shigella outbreak reach public health attention, and FoodNet has been cut from eight pathogens to two. Wastewater testing, which she credits Stanford engineer Ali Boehm with making into a science, tracked COVID in San Jose ahead of reported cases. Her team found HIV in Bay Area wastewater and is now testing in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where preliminary results show HIV in 84% of samples. She also covers a Palo Alto wastewater flu peak traced to seagulls and what she describes as the loss of 80% of CDC's wastewater funding.

Date/Time:
Date(s) - 11/03/26
8:15 am - 10:15 am

Event Location:
Zoom talk: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83593256859:

Speaker Information

Event Speaker:
Julie Parsonnet, MD

Event Speaker Title:
George DeForest Barnett Professor Emerita, Medicine (Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine) and Epidemiology and Population Health

Event Speaker Company:
Stanford

Event Speaker Bio:

Dr. Parsonnet is an Infectious Diseases clinician and epidemiologist whose research focuses on the role of infections in chronic disease. Her early work was pivotal in establishing H. pylori as a cause of gastric cancer and gastric lymphoma as well as protective effects of infections against esophageal diseases. More recently, she has focused on how exposures to infectious agents affects metabolism, growth and human body temperature. Dr. Parsonnet also has clinical interests in tuberculosis and in coccidioidomycosis. Dr. Parsonnet has had more than 30 years of continuous NIH funding. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, Association of American Physicians, American Epidemiological Society, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Event Details

Cost:
$0

Add To Calendar