After publishing a Dispatch item on the pending Food Safety and Modernization Act, in which we stated that approximately 5,000 people in the U.S. are killed annually from food-borne illness, our reader Dean O. Cliver, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, and an ACSH advisor, wrote in to tell us that the real number of deaths was actually only 18. But a new report from the CDC announced yesterday and published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases says that between 1,600 and 3,000 die each year from food-borne illness. This left ACSH staffers scratching their heads.
Consulting Dr. Cliver once more and reading the CDC survey results more carefully, ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross was disappointed to find that the figures the CDC presents “are just ‘guesstimates’ based upon a weighted average. The numbers are extrapolated to the total U.S. population and are ‘correct’ within a fudge factor of three to five. The CDC assumes that 99 percent of all food-borne illness deaths are under-reported, and who’s to say that they’re wrong? This is probably why the number of deaths has fluctuated from 5,000 to 1,600.”
According to the CDC report, norovirus is the most common disease-causing germ and accounts for 58 percent of the 9.4 million episodes of food-borne illnesses.
But norovirus isn’t only transmitted via contaminated food, says ACSH’s Dr. Bloom. “It’s the most infectious virus in the world and is easily transmitted by person-to-person contact as well. I don’t understand how they attributed 5.5 million cases of the ‘stomach flu’ to food contamination. While this is certainly one vector for the spread of the virus, it is probably not the most common.”
Coming in at second place, Salmonella causes about one million infections a year.
“Food-borne illness is a serious problem associated with hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and it would be great to find mechanisms that will reduce contamination and save more people as well as health care dollars,” says Dr. Ross.