Editorial policy

Public Health Trace doesn't have a newsroom or editorial staff writing original stories. This page explains exactly how the titles, summaries, and text you see on the site are produced, so it's clear what is and isn't editorial judgment.

How titles are generated

Recall titles are chosen deterministically from the official fields a source provides, in a fixed order: the recalled product's brand name, if published; otherwise the recalling company's name; otherwise the product description from the recall record; and only as a last resort, the source's own recall number or notice identifier. No title is written by a person or a language model -- the same input always produces the same title.

Automated extraction and AI-assisted tools

Public Health Trace uses automated tools, including AI-assisted extraction, to organize information from official sources. For CDC outbreak announcement pages specifically, a structured extraction step reads the agency's own published page content and pulls out fields such as the outbreak's title, disease, implicated food, case counts, and consumer recommendations. That extraction is constrained by validation rules instructing it to never guess, infer, or invent a value that isn't explicitly stated in the source text -- an unstated field is recorded as unknown, never filled in. Every extracted field is retained together with its own outcome (captured or unknown) and, where available, the exact source text it was drawn from, so it can always be traced back to what the agency actually published.

Automated extraction does not independently create medical advice or interpretation, and it does not fabricate a fact the source didn't publish. Automated output never replaces the linked official announcement, which remains the authoritative record for that outbreak.

Source attribution

Every recall, outbreak, and surveillance record links back to the official source it came from. When Public Health Trace shows a field the source didn't publish (for example, lot codes not captured by a given importer -- see methodology), it says so explicitly rather than leaving a misleading blank or inventing a value.

Corrections and review

If a record looks wrong, our corrections policy explains how to report it and what happens next. Because Public Health Trace republishes agency data rather than authoring it, most corrections trace back to either an import error on our side (which we fix directly) or an error in the original source record (which we note and point you to the agency to correct at the source).