According to public health officials this Tuesday, progress has been made in combating the microbes behind 50 million yearly U.S. food poisoning cases. These affect one in six Americans. This comes from the newest federal FoodNet report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows that total food-borne illnesses dropped by nearly a quarter in the last decade and a half, but salmonella infections have steadily refused to drop, climbing slightly in recent years.
CDC director Thomas Frieden said, “The bottom line today is that food-borne disease is still far too common.” He noted that yearly estimates were 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths nationwide from contaminated food. “We've made virtually no progress against salmonella,” said Dr. Frieden.
For the survey the team collected 2010 outbreak data and lab results from 10 states, and directly identified 4,200 hospitalizations and 68 deaths from nine food-borne diseases. Salmonella, a group of roughly 2,500 strains of intestinal bacteria, was responsible for most of those cases, including 23 of the deaths.
“We have a long way to go,” said Agriculture Department official Elizabeth Hagen. Overall, rates of infections from the top six food poisoning bacteria have dropped 23% in the last 15 years, suggests the 10-state survey data. But while salmonella rates also started to drop in the 1990s, they've actually seen an increase of 10% in the last few years so that they now match the 1996 rate of 17.6 cases for every 100,000 people. The bacteria's persistence is explained by the variety of foods and animals that can harbor the bacteria, not just eggs and chicken but everything from orange juice to pet turtles. A 2010 salmonella outbreak that sickened about 2,000 people led to the recall of 500 million eggs from two Iowa farms said CDC epidemiologist Christopher Braden. CDC and the Agriculture Department plan a food safety advertising campaign to try and educate people better about the risks of the disease, where many cases are caused by undercooked poultry.
Public health officials in the United States focus on the deadly Shiga toxin-producing E.coli infection known as O157:H7, which is best known for causing the 1993 outbreak that killed four people who ate tainted hamburgers from Jack in the Box. The incidence of that infection fell by roughly half between 1997 and 2010, according to Vital Signs, an annual food safety report that summarizes data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet).
The FDA last summer put in place new rules that should reduce illnesses caused by salmonella in eggs, the FDA's Michael R. Taylor said.
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