According to a new report published Thursday, 14 different pathogens causing food poisoning cost the United States $14 billion annually in terms of human disease. The report comes from the University of Florida Emerging Pathogens Institute that found that out of all the pathogen-food combinations they studied, campylobacter in poultry was the single worst offender, causing more than 600,000 illnesses per year, hospitalizing more than 7,000 people and costing, annually, $1.3 billion and 9,500 quality-of-life years.
Among the top ten pathogen-food combinations are campylobacter, salmonella, listeria monocytogenes, Toxoplasma gondii and norovirus in various foodstuffs that cost more than $8 billion in direct medical costs and lost wages said the report. In second place is toxoplasma in pork; that parasite poses a particular danger for pregnant women and costs an estimated $1.2 billion a year. While relatively few people get ill from toxoplasma compared with more common bacteria such as salmonella, when a pregnant woman is sickened, the results can be devastating in terms of lifelong disability for her baby or even loss of the fetus, Morris said. Listeria in deli meats was ranked third, at a cost of $1.1 billion a year. Salmonella was flagged as the bacterium that causes the most disease overall, resulting in $3 billion in annual costs. Besides contamination in poultry, salmonella can be found in produce, eggs and other foods.
J. Glenn Morris, the director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida and one of the authors of the study said, “We tend to think of food-borne disease as 24 hours of diarrhea and it’s over… What this shows is that there are diseases that have significant other manifestations that result in complications, even death. And as a result, the public health burden is so much greater.” The report recommends toughening current standards for campylobacter and salmonella in turkey and chicken. Morris and the other researchers recommend that the U.S. Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration form a joint strategy to reduce salmonella contamination. Policymakers at the USDA, which regulates meat, poultry and some egg products, and the FDA, which oversees the rest of the food supply, should consider the economic burden on society when deciding how to direct food safety resources, Morris said. “You can begin to use these more sophisticated analytic tools, which can serve as the basis of spending public dollars in terms of food safety,” he said.
Despite the heavy public health burden of campylobacter in poultry, the USDA only recently set standards for that bacterium in chicken and turkey. The standards will take effect in July and place limits on the amount of campylobacter in poultry products that are processed in a slaughterhouse. The agency also tightened the existing standards for salmonella in poultry.
Carol L. Tucker-Foreman of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America said, “In the desire to get support for modernizing FDA’s food safety laws, I think the discussion slighted the public health dangers associated with meat and poultry…By definition, the slaughter of meat and poultry products is always a high risk and if you get contamination coming out of the slaughterhouse, you increase the risk it will get through to consumers at the end.” Tucker-Foreman said.
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