01.05.2013

Emerg Infect Dis (2013)

Each year, roughly 48 million people (1 in 6) get sick from food eaten in the United States. Although major pathogens account for more than 9 million of these sicknesses, linking individual illnesses to a particular food is rarely possible except during an outbreak.
Painter et al. developed a method of attributing illnesses to specific food groups based on a decade of outbreak data (data from outbreak-associated illnesses for 1998-2008), including those that implicate complex foods (that is, foods that have ingredients from several food categories).
This study provides a comprehensive set of estimates of how much foodborne illness is accounted for by each of 17 food categories. These are our most comprehensive estimates available to answer the question: which foods make us ill?
22% of annual hospitalizations were attributed to meat-poultry commodities. More deaths were attributed to poultry (19%) than to any other commodity, and most poultry-associated deaths were caused by Listeria or Salmonella spp.