Despite efforts to improve food safety in recent years, the United States is still confronting with an elevated number of food-borne illnesses, according to a federal report released on Thursday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed data on food-borne illnesses from 10 US states that participate in federally-funded poisoning monitoring system. The states are as follows: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee.
The CDC researchers looked at the incidence of salmonella, Listeria, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Listeria, Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157, Shigella, Vibrio and Yersinia and found that some of them - Yersinia, Shigella, Listeria, Campylobacter, and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli 0157 – have become less common since 1996-1998. But overall, the rate of reported food-borne illness hasn’t budged much since 2004, Robert Tauxe, MD, MPH, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases, said.
Overall, there were 18,499 laboratory-confirmed cases of nine food-borne illnesses in 2008 in the states involved in the research. There were 7,444 cases of salmonella, 5,825 cases of Campylobacter, 3,029 cases of Shingella, 1,036 cases of Cryptosporidium, 718 cases of E. coli, 164 cases of Yersinia, 135 cases of Listeria, 131 cases of Vibrio and 17 cases of Cyclospora.
The findings reflect “the complexity of the problem, with many different foods becoming potentially contaminated, including more fresh produce. It reflects that fact that pathogens like E. coli 0157 and salmonella can spread in the environment and contaminate a number of different foods, some of which we have not seen in the past. And the food industry is also complicated and changing, with a variety of different arenas and components from all over the world,” Tauxe said.
The Food and Drug Administration which oversees the safety of most food in the United States, has been under fire for years on Capitol Hill and among health advocates for not doing its job properly. According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, the FDA’s capability to protect Americans against food-borne illnesses is hampered by staffing shortages, infrequent inspections and lax enforcement at fresh produce processing plants.
FDA inspections, although rare, do not solve the discovered problems, as the FDA relies on the industry to solve them without oversight and follow-up, the report also found. More exactly, it says that 2,002 domestic companies were inspected an average of two times from 2000 through 2007. Though problems were observed in 41 percent of these inspections, FDA frequently relied on firms “to take voluntary corrective action.” Furthermore, GAO found that 92 percent of samples taken from imports were tested for pesticides rather than pathogens.
FDA’s director of food safety and security, David Acheson said the agency is moving ahead with new tactics to try to prevent outbreaks and to react more quickly when they occur. “This has to be addressed with a proactive, dynamic approach to new strategies to protect American consumers,” he said.
