Foodborne Illness

Abstract

Welcome to Public Health Moment from the University of Minnesota. The United States has made little progress on preventing food borne illness, despite what Americans have been told in recent months. That’s according to infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. <Osterholm: “Over the past six weeks there have been two major news stories about food safety that have come out that have suggested that in fact the food supply is getting safer – and it will even get safer in the future, based on recent legislation. First of all, it is a fact that the study that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in December, suggesting that there were big differences in the numbers of food-borne disease cases, including deaths, between 1999 and now, actually is not the case. But really for the last 11 years, the numbers have been flat – that basically there haven’t been any major changes. The bottom line message is that food-borne disease still is an important problem in this country, that it hasn’t gotten much worse, but it also hasn’t gotten much better.”> Another problem in addressing food borne illness, Osterholm says, is that Congress passed the federal food modernization act earlier this year, but with no funding attached. <Osterholm: “And when people say, ‘well, but in this very cash-strapped, kind of, budget-tight world, why do that,’ the cost-benefit of doing this is huge. The cost of food-borne disease far, far outstrips the investment of trying to prevent it.” For Public Health Moment, I’m Mark Engebretson.