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

The FERN division in USDAÂ’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is seeking to award a cooperative agreement

credit:

for providing and maintaining a secure communication and collaboration portal which will provide the FERN with capability, capacity and readiness data for the network member laboratories.

In addition, this portal will provide for:
(1) training event registration and historical tracking of attendees; (2) Just in time training with video and webinar capability to multi-agency participants; (3) proficiency test event registration and historical tracking of participants; (4) public webpage maintenance and enhancement and each (1-4) data set will be organized and output/reported in the format and manner specified by FERN.