Food Born Illness

 Eater…beware. I’m David Sparks. That report next. An  outbreak of food- borne illness occurs when a group of people consume the same contaminated food and two or more of them come down with the same illness.  It may be a group that ate a meal together somewhere, or it may be a group of people who do not know each other at all, but who all happened to buy and eat the same contaminated item from a grocery store or restaurant.  For an outbreak to occur, something must have happened to contaminate a batch of food that was eaten by a group of people. 

Outbreaks are increasingly being recognized that are more widespread, affecting people in many different places, and that are spread out over several weeks.  For example, the recent outbreak of salmonella traced to the peanut processing plant in Georgia whose products were marketed under several different brand names in many different states. 

Senate Ag Committee Chairman Tom Harkin is outraged.

(Harkin) “To say that food safety in this country is just a patchwork system is giving it too much credit. Food safety in America has too often become a hit or miss gamble. That is truly frightening. When Americans can’t count on the safety of basic items, like peanut butter, when we can’t even depend on that, that peanut butter that we put in our kids’ sandwiches that they take to school, if that’s not safe, then we have to ask what is. We’re almost to that point now in food where it’s ‘Eater beware.’ ”

Harkin cited numbers from The Centers for Disease Control showing that there are 76-million cases of food-borne illness annually in the U.S. - resulting in 325-thousand hospitalizations and five-thousand deaths.