What lettuce-watch is, who it’s for, and where it comes from.
What this is
A public-health surveillance site tracking foodborne outbreaks with a focus on leafy-greens (romaine, spinach, bagged salad) and ground beef — the two highest-risk matrices for STEC E. coli. Every outbreak dossier includes a traceback chain (farm → processor → distributor → retailer), strain-level cluster linkage, and at least three source citations.
Three load-bearing features
- Traceback visualization with honest gap nodes where the public investigation has not yet disclosed operator names.
- Strain-level cluster linkage via NCBI Pathogen Detection — when WGS links cases across states, the outbreak is rendered as one event.
- Citation on every claim — every number on the site links to the CDC MMWR, FDA Environmental Assessment, USDA-FSIS recall, or peer-reviewed paper that documented it.
Audience
- Journalists — need the lede, the numbers, the citable source, and a press-ready timeline.
- Food-safety researchers and epidemiologists — need strain IDs, serotypes, traceback chain provenance, case-count history, links to FDA EA reports and CDC MMWR.
- Curious consumers — need one-glance "should I avoid romaine from Yuma this week?" guidance, with a path to the underlying evidence.
What this is not
This is not a clinical site and not medical advice. For active outbreaks affecting you, follow CDC Food Safety and your state health department.
Source code
Open-source under private repository at git.catalystgroup.tech/herman/lettuce-watch (project 242). Built with Hugo, GitLab Pages, and Python ingestion scripts (Phase 1b+).
Theme
This site uses the canonical hermanity theme — the shared Hugo theme used across all *.hermanity.dev sites.