CDC Revises Annual Foodborne Illness Estimates
“Foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses each year in the United States.”
For the past 11 years, this statement has been quoted in countless news stories, scientific studies, legal documents, and arguments for expansive government regulations. The number “76 million” was an estimate calculated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1999. However, the estimate truly morphed into more of a factual statistic, the perfect lead-in or conclusion to every tale of foodborne illness.
The CDC just completed a second review on the impact of foodborne diseases and has released new figures in two studies published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The agency now estimates that about 48 million Americans get sick each year from foodborne diseases (a difference of 28 million people). CDC explained that the difference between the 1999 estimate and the current estimate is due to improvements in the quality and quantity of the data used and new methods used to estimate foodborne disease. CDC further described the approximation as follows:
Of the total estimate of 48 million illnesses annually, CDC estimates that 9.4 million illnesses are due to 31 known foodborne pathogens. The remaining 38 million illnesses result from unspecified agents, which include known agents without enough data to make specific estimates, agents not yet recognized as causing foodborne illness, and agents not yet discovered. In both the 1999 and current estimates, unspecified agents were responsible for roughly 80 percent of estimated illnesses.
An estimated 38 million illnesses (out of the total estimated 48 million illnesses) each year are thought to be caused by foodborne diseases that cannot yet be tracked or have not even been discovered.
The scientific guesswork behind “48 million” is hard for me to swallow because this estimate, as its predecessor of 76 million, will be used as a statistic to vilify our food industry. “48 million” will be touted before the masses in newspapers, movies, courtrooms, and Washington, D.C. as evidence that our food manufacturers are not even coming close to doing enough.
CDC is an incredibly valuable institution which has helped advance food safety in many aspects. Industry has learned food safety lessons from CDC’s research, and I concede that CDC’s new studies have value when properly utilized. However, it is a shame that “48 million” will be extrapolated from those studies and regularly, perhaps even exclusively, referenced without a full explanation of the estimation. Rest assured that this number will not be uttered when I am in the courtroom.
Within the CDC’s new studies is hard data evidencing that industry has made significant progress in the war on food safety. CDC stated that FoodNet provides the best measure of trends in foodborne diseases. FoodNet is a surveillance system designed to detect and collect information on every person in 10 states (representing 15% of the U.S. population, or 46 million Americans) with a laboratory confirmed case of foodborne illness. FoodNet completed an analysis comparing its data from 2009 with data from two other time periods and found:
- Rates of infection were at least 25% lower for Shigella, Yersinia, Campylobacter, and Listeria than they were a decade ago.
- Rates of infection with E. coli O157:H7, which causes one of the most severe forms of foodborne illness, decreased by 25% in 2009 compared with the most recent 3 years, reaching the lowest level since 2004.
As always, I am proud to defend the hard working Americans who feed our families and I will not allow their accomplishments to go unnoticed.
