The Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) currently comprises 150+ federal, state, and local government regulatory laboratories with varying capacities to perform threat agent testing.

FERN has 41 cooperative agreements already in place which target state, local, and tribal FERN labs in an effort

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to augment the network?s microbiological, chemical, and radiological threat agent testing capacities.

The current FERN cooperative agreement labs also focus on developing better diagnostic capabilities for threat agent testing within the Network partner laboratories.

These current cooperative agreements enhance the ability to analyze for microbiological, chemical and radiological threat agents utilizing FERN methods and improve laboratory capacities for food defense assignments and outbreak response.

In support of emergency readiness, response and recovery efforts, FERN has been an integral participant of numerous state emergency response exercises that have warranted FERN state laboratory support as provided by the 150+ state laboratories within FERN, however frequent after action review identifies the lack of a comprehensive food emergency response plan that addresses the following systems:
Notification, Communication, Deployment, Sampling, Field- Diagnostics, Chain of Custody, Transport, Fern-lab Diagnostics, FERN Reporting, After Action Gap Analyses, etc.

Subsequent implementation of these established food emergency response systems would occur on a regular basis on a regional scale in support of the food safety and protection efforts of the USDA and FDA, collectively FERN.

This Food Emergency Management Cooperative Agreement will augment the current FERN southeast regional coordination efforts and expand the number of comprehensive state food emergency response plans.

Subsequent construction of a regional food emergency response plan and its implementation will augment the FSIS FERN mission for coordination and communication of food emergency efforts on a regional scale.

This new Food Emergency Management Cooperative Agreement would support the administrative costs for coordination meetings, communications, scheduling, implementation exercises and related exercise costs.

Procurement of meeting space and travel costs directly associated with such efforts must be according to state government per diem rates and reimbursement of personnel expenses.

[NOTE:
The agreements will not support construction costs.]