Nearly 50 million Americans get sick every year from eating food contaminated with bacteria, parasites or viruses. While most cases of food poisoning are relatively mild, tens of thousands require hospitalization and many result in death. More staggering than the numbers themselves is the fact that we haven’t made much progress in combating foodborne illnesses in recent years.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the incidence of food poisoning from common bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria remained level in 2012. Even worse, other kinds of infections saw an increase — foodborne illnesses from the campylobacter bacteria in chicken and dairy, for instance, rose 14 percent; and cases related to the vibrio bug in shellfish soared 43 percent.
While reports of food poisoning are down from the 1990s, “right now we're just about where we were in [the years] 2006 to 2008,” according to Robert Tauxe, MD, deputy director of the division of foodborne, waterborne and environmental diseases at the CDC. “We may need to identify additional ways to reduce contamination, as well as heightening awareness among consumers,” said Dr. Tauxe.
For Barbara Kowalcyk, CEO and director of research for the Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention, the threat of food poisoning is a tragic reality. Her son Kevin died when he was two years old after becoming infected with E. coli from meat.
“It’s hard to get the message across in the U.S. because everyone thinks we have the safest food supply in the world,” said Kowalcyk, who now lobbies for changes in the food safety system. “People are lulled into a false sense of security and think ‘it looks good so therefore it must be safe.’ Unfortunately, bacteria don’t care who produces the food or eats it.”
Protecting yourself and your family is a tremendous challenge. Many of the same foods that are part of a healthy diet are also common causes of foodborne illnesses. The CDC lists leafy greens as the No. 1 cause of food poisoning, and a recent report said contaminated vegetables, fruits and nuts sicken 4.4 million people a year.
If there’s meat on your plate, then consider this: The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) recently compiled a “risky meat” list, based on CDC data on food-poisoning outbreaks. Chicken and ground beef were ranked as highest-risk, followed by steak and turkey.
But Doug Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University, cautions that lists of what foods can make you sick don’t tell the whole story. There are many ways that foods can become contaminated on the way to your table. Water used to spray fields, for example, can contaminate fruits and vegetables before they leave the farm. How “animals are raised, slaughtered and processed” can introduce bacteria into our meat, as Sarah A. Klein, author of the CSPI study, points out.
“Some companies do a really great job and have food safety down pat, while others are horrible and eventually get caught,” said Powell.
Kowalcyk agrees, and stresses that “food safety is a complicated system that clearly needs improvement.”
It’s true, as Powell said, that often “a consumer has no way of knowing what foods may be contaminated and which ones aren’t.” But there are ways to keep informed about foodborne illnesses that have been reported — and to help report new ones.
The Food and Drug Administration keeps an updated list of food product recalls on its Web site. If you think you may have become ill because of something you ate, you can report it to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
There are also simple preventive measures that you can take at home, in terms of food storage and preparation, to reduce the risk of food poisoning. The Mayo Clinic suggests:
- Make sure utensils and food surfaces are clean. If you use a knife and cutting board to cut raw meat, clean them with hot, soapy water before using them again.
- Separate raw and ready-to-eat foods to prevent cross-contamination.
- Perishable foods should be refrigerated or frozen within two hours of purchasing or preparing them.
- Make sure foods are properly cooked, and check internal temperature with a meat thermometer. Ground beef should be cooked to 160 F; steaks and roasts to at least 145 F; pork to at least 160 F; chicken and turkey to 165 F; and fish usually to 145 F.
- Defrost food properly — not at room temperature. The safest way to thaw foods is to defrost them in the refrigerator or to use the “defrost” setting on a microwave.
- The best advice of all: When in doubt, throw it out.