Foodborne Disease in 2011 — The Rest of the Story

[Guest guest]

Recent media headlines might have you believe that our food supply is

substantially more safe than it was a decade ago and about to get even

safer. First, on December 15, 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention (CDC) announced a long-awaited reanalysis of the burden of

foodborne illness in the United States and reported a substantial decrease

in the estimated incidence of foodborne disease between 1999 and 2011. Then,

on January 4, 2011, President Barack Obama signed into law the Food Safety

Modernization Act, the first major legislation related to the food-safety

authority of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 1938. But as the

late radio commentator Harvey would say, “You know what the news is; in

a minute, you’re going to hear . . . the rest of the story.”

As the first set of headlines indicated, the CDC reported a substantial

decrease in the estimated incidence of foodborne disease between 1999 and

2011. In 1999, Mead and colleagues published the first comprehensive

estimates of foodborne disease in the United States.1 Scallan and

colleagues, in two recent articles, detail new estimates of the burden of

foodborne disease for 31 known2 and unspecified3 infectious agents. In 1999,

it was estimated that annually, foodborne pathogens caused 76 million

episodes of illness, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5000 deaths. On the basis

of these estimates, 27% of Americans could expect to have a foodborne

illness each year, 115 per 100,000 population would be hospitalized, and

almost 2 per 100,000 would die.

The CDC now estimates that there are approximately 48 million foodborne

illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3000 deaths per year. That means

that 15% of Americans can expect to have a foodborne illness annually and

that 41 in 100,000 will be hospitalized and 1 in 100,000 will die. However,

the authors have strongly cautioned that the 1999 estimates cannot be

compared with the current ones for purposes of trend analysis, because

different methods and underlying assumptions were used. Therefore, we cannot

draw inferences from these CDC data about the relative safety of our food

supply today, as compared with 12 years ago.

rest of article here<http://healthpolicyandreform.nejm.org/?p=13832 & query=TOC>

--

Ortiz, MS, RD

*The FRUGAL Dietitian* <http://www.thefrugaldietitian.com>

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