The Federal government’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) recently released preliminary data about the frequency of certain foodborne illnesses in 10 monitoring states for the year 2008. This is the equivalent of the government’s report card for food safety. The scores, as they say, leave much room for improvement.
The “take away” point from this data is that “progress toward the national health objectives [for foodborne pathogens] has plateaued, suggesting that fundamental problems with bacterial and parasitic contamination are not being resolved.”
Stripped of its “journal speak,” the data shows that after making progress for a few years, efforts to safeguard our food have gone nowhere.
“The lack of recent progress toward the national health objective targets and the occurrence of large multistate outbreaks points to gaps in the current food safety system and the need to continue to develop and evaluate food safety practices as food moves from the farm to the table.”
A closer reading of the data actually points to more serious problems. For example, in just one year (from 2007 to 2008), test samples of ground beef yielding E. coli O157:H7 nearly doubled from 0.24% to 0.47%. This is really quite shocking.
It was also interesting to note that only 25.7% of E. coli O157:H7 infections and 7.4% of Salmonella cases are associated with outbreaks. In other words, in the vast majority of human illness associated with these two pathogens, the source is never identified.
In a way, this is even more shocking. It shows we’re still very inadequate when it comes to testing for and analyzing foodborne pathogens – in other words, what we don’t know will hurt us.
