2018 Was a Record Year for Foodborne Illnesses

2018 Was a Record Year for Foodborne Illnesses

And that’s actually a good thing.
A recent E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce caused at least 65 people in the United States and Canada to fall ill.

A recent E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce caused at least 65 people in the United States and Canada to fall ill.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a series of disquieting food warnings over the past few days after an E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce caused at least 65 people in the United States and Canada to fall ill (and left countless more scrambling to find a substitute for their Thanksgiving salads).

The CDC had good reason to be ominous: Only a month earlier, ground beef tainted with another strain of E. coli sickened at least 18 people and left one dead. But even that paled in comparison to the multi-state E. coli outbreak this past spring that infected over 200 and killed five. (Here romaine lettuce was again an associated ingredient.) And E. coli is hardly the only pathogen afflicting American eaters.

The CDC’s index of Selected Multistate Foodborne Outbreak Investigations, a running record of the year’s large and notable outbreak investigations, also shows 15 salmonella outbreaks and multiple outbreaks of listeria and cyclospora. The CDC’s investigations list currently features 21 cases—the most, according to CNN, undertaken by the agency in the last decade.

Predictably, media reactions reached for superlatives. “This Is a Record Year for Foodborne Illnesses,” read a Grub Street headline. “This [is a] record-setting year for foodborne illness,” declared the Tampa Bay Times.

Those clippings are clicky and grim, but they’re also at least somewhat misleading, because the current state of foodborne illnesses in the U.S. is actually, well, quite sunny.

The CDC’s Selected Outbreak Investigations list is not an exhaustive list of all foodborne outbreaks in the U.S. It’s not even a full list of all the foodborne illness outbreaks that were investigated by the CDC this year. It’s just a list of outbreak investigations the CDC has deemed noteworthy. For example, the selected list shows 14 outbreaks in 2016, but, according to the CDC dashboard’s full list of outbreaks, 2016 had 3,950 outbreaks across the U.S………….more here

Click here for reuse options!
Copyright 2018 Hiram's 1555 Blog

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.