Food Safety & Fruit

Food Safety & Fruit. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Janet Anderberg, retired Public Health Advisor spent her career tracking down local food borne illnesses.

ANDERBERG: The national statistics for the state of Washington says that we have 1.5 million cases of food borne disease every year, year after year in the state of Washington with 65-hundred hospitalizations and approximately 100 deaths per year, every year from food poisoning.

She says those numbers are pretty well split between eastern and western Washington and she says that it normally appears as one of three things.

ANDERBERG: Food borne disease that most people think of is nausea, vomiting and diarrhea and it’s what people think about the most. And actually if it was just the vomiting and the diarrhea I think this would be a non kind of issue because people can vomit and you get over it and you have some diarrhea and you get over it. There’s these complications of food borne disease that affect people.

Anderberg says there are some extreme complications of food borne illnesses that can really get your attention.

ANDERBERG: When we’re talking about the complications of kidney disease and lifelong, chronic rheumatoid arthritis in 2% of the cases and it’s a result of food poisoning, it seems like a disconnect. A lot of people don’t put those kind of things together. Guillain-Barré syndrome is a condition where paralysis sets in.

She cautions that food borne illnesses should not be taken lightly. More tomorrow.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.