October 30, 2001
Beef near bottom of activists' list of food-borne illness vectors
by Brigette Gaucher
A new Outbreak Alert! report released by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that the top three vehicles of food-borne illness were seafood, followed by eggs, then fruit and vegetables.
CSPI analyzed data from about 1,600 food-borne outbreaks affecting more than 70,000 people between 1990 and 2001. The Washington, D.C.-based activists reported that:
Seafood caused 340 outbreaks with 5,133 cases of food poisoning.
“Seafood and other foods regulated by the Food and Drug Administration caused four times more outbreaks than meat and poultry products, which are regulated by the Agriculture Department,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, CSPI's director of food safety. “Despite that, FDA has only one-tenth as many food-safety inspectors, and about one-third of the inspection budget of the USDA.”
Outbreak Alert! is published annually by CSPI since 1999. The report is compiled from such sources as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state and local health departments and medical and scientific journals.
Outbreaks of unknown origin, that is, where no food or pathogen could be identified, are not included in Outbreak Alert!
This article reprinted with permission from Meat Marketing and Technology Magazine.
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