Public health officials pointed to progress Tuesday in combating the microbes behind 50 million yearly U.S. food poisoning cases affecting one in six Americans.
The latest federal FoodNet report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that total food-borne-illness cases dropped by nearly a quarter in the past decade and a half, but salmonella infections have steadily refused to drop, climbing slightly in recent years.
"The bottom line today is that food-borne disease is still far too common," said CDC Director Thomas Frieden, pointing to yearly estimates of 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths nationwide from contaminated food.
The FoodNet survey collected 2010 outbreak data and lab results from 10 states, and directly identified 4,200 hospitalizations and 68 deaths from nine food-borne diseases. Salmonella, a group of roughly 2,500 strains of intestinal bacteria, was responsible for most of those cases, including 23 of the deaths. And amid the good news about a continuing decline in food poisoning, the stubborn persistence of salmonella stood out as a worry for health officials.
"We have a long way to go," said Agriculture Department official Elizabeth Hagen. Overall, rates of infections from the top six food poisoning bugs have dropped 23% in the past 15 years, suggests the 10-state survey data. But while salmonella rates also started to drop in the 1990s, they've actually seen an increase of 10% in the past few years so that they now match the 1996 rate of 17.6 cases for every 100,000 people. The bug's persistence is explained by the variety of foods and animals that can harbor the bacteria, not just eggs and chicken but everything from orange juice to pet turtles.
A 2010 salmonella outbreak that sickened about 2,000 people led to the recall of 500 million eggs from two Iowa farms. That incident was a small blip in the wider tide of salmonella cases nationwide, said CDC epidemiologist Christopher Braden. FDA, CDC and the Agriculture Department plan a food safety advertising campaign to try and educate people better about the risks of the disease, where many cases are caused by undercooked poultry.
Amid an E. coli outbreak in Germany, the annual survey suggests U.S. outbreaks of the best-known E. coli strain, O157:H7, have dropped by more than half over 15 years, a goal of the nation's public health system. The report also finds increased U.S. reporting of E. coli cases involving strains that produce the "shiga" toxin capable of causing kidney failure, similar to the one plaguing Europe. Braden said better tests explain the increase.
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