By Gina Lovasi, PhD, MPH, the Dana and David Dornsife Dean and Professor of Epidemiology at Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health

Relatives often ask me about happenings in public health. I find these discussions interesting, and also want to be cautious about how my answers are heard. Am I heard as a daughter or sister-in-law, or as a public health expert?

A challenge that may be familiar to others is that the topics in which I have deep expertise are few, and the topics related to public health in the news are many. Yet I also believe that our public health training includes breadth, at least in strategies for finding credible information.

Related to the food environment, I have greater depth of experience with measurement at the level of the kinds of retail stores present in neighborhoods, and their relevance to cardiovascular disease. From this vantage point, I am delighted to hear about fresh items like lettuce being available and affordable and expect their consumption to be a positive for chronic disease prevention. Yet it is also true that fresh items we do not cook before eating can be linked to food safety concerns.

So what are those of us in public health to do when faced with a question beyond our areas of deep expertise? Should we just turn to a casual online search, then accept and endorse the AI summary? I certainly would not want to stop there.

We can contribute to a better informed conversation by taking additional steps:

1. Look at (and go to) the sources being used as the basis for the AI summary, to verify that they are credible and being accurately summarized.

2. Pay attention to what drives the source to produce content, noticing that ad-based sites may have incentives to paint a situation as especially extreme.

3. Build your own trust with a few sources.

For myself, one of the sources that I learned about from a colleague and have turned to is University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP, and that’s where I looked to start getting caught up on the Cyclospora outbreaks. I find this source on infectious diseases to be frequently updated, and appreciate the accessibility of updates, drawing from sources such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which offers summaries of both case counts and actions taken like the recall of affected lettuce.

So, from these sources, does it seem OK to eat lettuce again? Yes, but with caution that even as any specific outbreak ends, there may be vulnerabilities in our food production and inspection systems. Ensure lettuce is washed before eating.