Advances in the field of genomic sequencing technology have meant scientists are able to track listeria food poisoning outbreaks better than ever before.

Unlocking the entire human genome took scientists more than a decade and cost nearly $3 billion, but since the Human Genome Project achieved that goal in 2003, the cost of genomic sequencing has plummeted to less than $100 and the technology is now in regular use in the public health sphere.

Dr John Besser from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is using genomics to track listeria food poisoning outbreaks.

"Genomics is looking at all of the DNA in the bacteria or virus or fungus as a whole, instead of just looking at little pieces of it the way we've done in the past," Dr Besser said.

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"It's looking at the entire DNA sequence, the blueprint of every one of these pathogens to get all the maximal amount of information from them."

He said the new advances in genomics meant scientists were now able to more finely tune what is known as the "case definition".

"That allows us to link cases together [and] to contaminated foods or other exposures more precisely than ever before," Dr Besser said.

The recent cases of berries contaminated with hepatitis A in Australia are an example of the kind of problem this technology could be used to solve.

Genomics would be useful in deciding which cases were linked if the genomic sequences were the same, Dr Besser said.

If the technology continues to get cheaper, it will eventually supplant methods that are currently in use and will have important impacts on the way governments and other agencies deal with public health issues.

"We're hopeful that a large proportion of cases of... reportable diseases, those diseases that have significant public health impact will be sequenced so that public health officials can have a better idea of what's going on in the population, where there's potential contamination events, and hopefully in time to prevent more cases of disease and find out problems in our food supply that might not otherwise be discovered."

Dr John Besser is meeting today with other experts from around the world at the Communicable Disease Control conference in Brisbane.