Most Americans only worried about becoming sick from eating contaminated food when they travelled to distant lands. After all, it was almost indisputable that the U.S. food supply was the safest in the world. But a chain of recent events has raised doubts in the minds of many. These days, it seems that all food is suspect.
Ground meat may be contaminated with dangerous new strains of Escherichia coli and poultry is rife with another recently publicised bacterium called campylobacter. That faithful staple, the egg, is a carrier of salmonella; the vegetable bin and fruit bowl may harbor protozoans with names like toxoplasma and cryptosporidium.
Outbreaks of hepatitis A have been traced to strawberries. It may seem like a good idea to post a table of foodborne pathogens on the refrigerator door. The threat, however, is frighteningly real.
The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, a private non-profit organisation, estimated that as many as 9,000 deaths and 6.5 to 33 million illnesses in the United States each year are food-related. The Department of Agriculture estimates that medical costs and productivity losses for seven specific pathogens in food, range from $6.5 billion to $34.9 billion annually. And, if the growing list of food recalls is any indication, the situation seems to be getting worse. The current message from the Food and Drug Administration is “Treat all foods as if they are potentially contaminated”