Tag: CDC report

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Certified Food Managers Guide to Foodborne Illness Statistics

Certified Food Managers Foodborne Illness Statistics

Gathering information on foodborne illness outbreaks gives us a greater insight into how these events start and what measures can be taken to prevent them in the future. The Center for Disease Control recently released a report outlining foodborne illness statistics and discussing testing and observation steps taken during outbreaks in 2018.

Certified Food Managers Foodborne Illness Statistics

CDC Report on Common Pathogens Causing Foodborne Illness

If you’ve taken a quick glance at this report, you may notice some very scientific language and a lot of statistics, so we’ll briefly break down some of the interesting facts in the report in simpler terms.

The bulk of this report discusses enteric infections, or food poisoning cases that affect the intestines. The two largest culprits discussed are campylobacter and salmonella infections. The CDC has confirmed nearly 10,000 infections of each in 2018. Following these two, e.Coli clocks in with nearly 3,000 cases, many of these coming from multiple outbreaks involving tainted romaine lettuce. This registers a 26-percent increase when compared to cases in 2015 to 2017.

Reading some of the discussions in this report indicate that the confirmed numbers are up partly due to improved testing methods. The CDC has increased the use culture-independent diagnostic tests, or CDITs, to diagnose suspected cases of enteric infections. This test is capable of identifying certain pathogens not routinely picked up by previously used testing methods.

While this report does have food-safety implications on a grand scale, what exactly does it mean to certified food managers?

We’ve drawn two conclusions from this report. First, improvements in testing technology show that illness from contaminated food is a larger issue than previous statistics have shown. This means that we should be more diligent then ever in promoting food safety in our establishments.

Finally, these advanced testing techniques have given us the most common pathogens and the food items that most commonly spread the infection. Seeing that there are targets the CDC has identified for improved food safety techniques gives us an insight into what types of ingredients require extra care. Certified food managers can be equipped with the knowledge that certain products are historically more susceptible than others and be diligent in inspecting shipments and following up on recalls and alerts concerning contaminated product.

Do statistics released by the CDC, USDA and other organizations have any effect on you handle food safety for susceptible products?

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Food Safety Training and Current Food Poisoning Statistics

Official statistics help us keep an eye on the state of food safety in our country. Recently, Food Safety News published a summary of a CDC report detailing the most common causes of food borne-illness. There are a few interesting findings in this report, but when breaking down this summary, we noticed two causes of illness that can be prevented or controlled with proper food safety training.

Food Safety Training and Current Food Poisoning Statistics
Copyright: rogistok / 123RF Stock Photo

Using Food-Illness Statistics for Food Safety Training

In the statistics released from this five year study, over 100,000 confirmed cases of food poisoning were recorded. Out of these cases, 5,699 were hospitalized and food-borne illness was responsible for 145 deaths. If we break down these cases to root causes, we can begin to see patterns that we can use for effective food safety training to target common pathogens.

Chicken was the cause of 12-percent of these cases, causing us to believe that many of these situations were the result of under-cooked poultry. It is vitally important to train your staff how to handle chicken properly. There are numerous cross-contamination risks involved in processing raw chicken. Process raw chicken away from areas where ready-to-eat product is being prepared and always store raw poultry on the bottom shelf. Finally, making sure to verify that your chicken has been cooked to 165-degrees is vitally important. We recommend that you use a thermocouple thermometer when verifying the temperature of chicken. These thermometers are highly accurate and ideal for measuring thin chicken breasts and smaller pieces of meat.

The study also shows that the Norovirus was responsible for over 27,000 cases of food-borne illness. Training can go a long way towards preventing Norovirus poisonings. Teach your staff to stay home when they are sick, wash their hands properly and frequently and to avoid bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods. Enforcing these three easy-to-do food handling procedures greatly reduces the risk of spreading the Norovirus.

While this study points out quite a few other causes of outbreaks, proper training reduces the risk of poisoning via improperly prepared chicken or the Norovirus. Are there any other ways you use statistics to target food safety training in your facility?