Holding an FDA-only Listeria summit is not a structural necessity. It is a choice. And it is the wrong one.
On July 8, the FDA announced a public meeting on August 18-19, 2026, at the Harvey W. Wiley Federal Building in College Park, Maryland, on the prevention of Listeria monocytogenes. It is billed as the first in a series — workshops, webinars, listening sessions — aimed at “new, collaborative approaches” to a problem that has not budged in a very long time.
I plan to be there, although the D.C. area in August is not the most comfortable time weather-wise.
I have been to a lot of these meetings over three decades, and I will keep going. But when I read the announcement, one word was missing, and it happens to be the name of the agency that regulates half the risk: USDA.
FDA says, in its own words, that Listeria is the fourth-leading cause of death from foodborne illness in this country, and that the incidence of listeriosis has remained essentially static for more than a decade. Note — A federal agency is admitting that a pathogen that kills roughly one in five of the people it seriously infects has not been meaningfully reduced in over ten years.
I have spent that decade — and the two before it — sitting across the table from the families behind that flat line. Parents who lost a pregnancy. Adult children who lost a mother to a deli sandwich. “Static” is not a plateau on a chart. It is the same funerals, year after year, while we convene to talk about best practices.
Here is the thing that should make an FDA-only meeting feel incomplete to anyone who works in this field.
The tri-agency data — from IFSAC, which is itself a collaboration of CDC, FDA, and USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service — attributes most listeriosis outbreaks to FDA-regulated foods: dairy, leafy greens and other row crops, and fruit. More than three-quarters of outbreak illnesses trace to those three categories. If you stopped there, you might conclude Listeria is FDA’s problem alone.
But those are outbreak estimates, built on a very small number of outbreaks, and the agencies themselves warn the numbers are less reliable for Listeria than for other pathogens. Most listeriosis is not part of any recognized outbreak. It is sporadic — one exposed person here, one there — and that is exactly where the deli case lives. When FDA, FSIS, and CDC ran their landmark risk assessment years ago, deli meats ranked as the single highest-risk food per serving and the leading source of listeriosis deaths. Deli meats are USDA/FSIS territory, under what is literally called the Listeria Rule, 9 C.F.R. § 430.
The honest picture is not that one agency owns this bug. FDA’s foods drive the outbreaks. FSIS’s deli case drives the per-serving death toll. Neither can call Listeria the other’s problem — which is precisely why a meeting with only one of the two regulators at the head table makes no sense.
I do not have to reach back to the 2011 cantaloupes that killed 33 people to prove it. I can point to Boar’s Head. In 2024, liverwurst and other deli meats from a plant in Jarratt, Virginia, sickened 61 people and killed 10 across multiple states — the deadliest listeriosis outbreak since those cantaloupes. That plant was inspected by USDA/FSIS. The inspection records that surfaced afterward — mold, insects, standing water, dripping condensation over exposed product, noncompliances left unresolved for two years — were FSIS records, because it was an FSIS-regulated facility. The plant is closed and I represent people whose lives it permanently changed.
You cannot have an honest national conversation about preventing the next Boar’s Head at a meeting where the agency that regulated Boar’s Head is not on the invitation.
This is what really gets me. FSIS is not a bystander waiting for FDA to lead. Since Boar’s Head, it has been running the most active Listeria program in the federal government. It expanded laboratory testing in January 2025 to screen for all Listeria species, not just L. monocytogenes, as an early-warning signal. It put inspectors on weekly verification of Listeriarisk factors at ready-to-eat plants. It prioritized in-depth Food Safety Assessments at facilities relying on sanitation alone. It reopened the Listeria Rule for review. And it stood up a new expert committee, specifically charged with Listeria, due to deliver science-based recommendations in 2026 — the very same year FDA is now convening its meeting.
Two agencies. Same pathogen. Same moment in time. Running on separate tracks, in separate buildings, as if the other did not exist. If ever there were a year for FDA and USDA to stand at the same podium on Listeria, this is it.
The convenient excuse is that these are two agencies with two jurisdictions and two sets of rules, so of course they meet separately. I do not buy it. The attribution data I cited above comes from IFSAC — CDC, FDA, and FSIS, sitting at one table, doing one analysis on this exact bug. They collaborate on the numbers already. There is no law of nature that keeps them from collaborating on the meeting.
Like I said, holding an FDA-only Listeria summit is not a structural necessity. It is a choice. And it is the wrong one.