WASHINGTON—The Centers for Disease Control reports that roughly one in six people in the United States gets sick every year from eating contaminated food. In recent years, consumers have become ill from products like ground beef, peppers, peanut butter, spinach, eggs, cookie dough, cantaloupe, and most recently in October, romaine lettuce (apparently).
The total number of illnesses annually from foodborne contaminates results in an estimated 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths.
The CDC says that each year, 1 million people get sick from food contaminated by salmonella.
In recent years, E. coli has been found most notably in meat and spinach. The bacterial strain E. coli O157:H7 causes diarrhea, abdominal pain, and fever for nearly 63,000 Americans each year. In a small percentage of the population, the complication known as the hemolytic uremic syndrome can arise causing intense pain, severe anemia, kidney failure, and even death, according to several medical sources.
No single U.S. federal agency has total responsibility for preventing, detecting, and responding to threats to our food supply. The brunt of it falls on the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Agriculture (USDA). These two departments head the Food Safety Working Group (FSWG), created by President Obama in March 2009, with the task of coordinating federal agencies to improve food safety.
“We are well on our way to building a modern food safety system,” said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, at a telebriefing on a two-year progress report of the FSWG Dec. 21.
