Foodborne illness

Foodborne illness (also known as foodborne disease and food poisoning)[1] is any illness resulting from the contamination of food by pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites,[2] as well as prions (the agents of mad cow disease), and toxins such as aflatoxins in peanuts, poisonous mushrooms, and various species of beans that have not been boiled for at least 10 minutes.

For contaminants requiring an incubation period, symptoms may not manifest for hours to days, depending on the cause and on the quantity of consumption.

Foodborne disease can be caused by a number of bacteria, such as Campylobacter jejuni, and chemicals, such as pesticides, medicines, and natural toxic substances, such as vomitoxin, poisonous mushrooms, or reef fish.

[17] The rare but potentially deadly disease botulism occurs when the anaerobic bacterium Clostridium botulinum grows in improperly canned low-acid foods and produces botulin, a powerful paralytic toxin.

[citation needed] Scandinavian outbreaks of Yersinia enterocolitica have recently increased to an annual basis, connected to the non-canonical contamination of pre-washed salad.

This is achieved through the implementation of strict hygiene rules and a public veterinary and phytosanitary service that monitors animal products throughout the food chain, from farming to delivery in shops and restaurants.

The term mycotoxin is usually reserved for the toxic chemical compounds naturally produced by fungi that readily colonize crops under given temperature and moisture conditions.

Foodborne viral infection are usually of intermediate (1–3 days) incubation period, causing illnesses which are self-limited in otherwise healthy individuals; they are similar to the bacterial forms described above.

Ptomaine poisoning was a myth that persisted in the public consciousness, in newspaper headlines, and legal cases as an official diagnosis, decades after it had been scientifically disproven in the 1910s.

[citation needed] At a Communist political convention in Massillon, Ohio,[64] and aboard a cruise ship in Washington, D.C., hundreds of people were sickened in separate incidents by tainted potato salad, during a single week in 1932, drawing national attention to the dangers of so-called "ptomaine poisoning" in the pages of the American news weekly, Time.

[65] In 1944, another newspaper article reported that over 150 people in Chicago were hospitalized with ptomaine poisoning, apparently from rice pudding served by a restaurant chain.

This ranges from hours to days (and rarely months or even years, such as in the case of listeriosis or bovine spongiform encephalopathy), depending on the agent, and on how much was consumed.

[citation needed] The long incubation period of many foodborne illnesses tends to cause those affected to attribute their symptoms to gastroenteritis.

Some types of microbes stay in the intestine, some produce a toxin that is absorbed into the bloodstream, and some can directly invade the deeper body tissues.

An unusually high stomach pH level (low acidity) greatly reduces the number of bacteria required to cause symptoms by a factor of between 10 and 100.

[citation needed] Foodborne illness often occurs as travelers' diarrhea in persons whose gut microbiota is unaccustomed to organisms endemic to the visited region.

[citation needed] Asymptomatic subclinical infection may help spread these diseases, particularly Staphylococcus aureus, Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shigella, Enterobacter, Vibrio cholerae, and Yersinia.

[79] This data pertains to reported medical cases of 23 specific pathogens in the 1990s, as opposed to total population estimates of all foodborne illness for the United States.

In this study, similar methods of assessment were applied to data from circa 2000, which showed that the rate of foodborne gastroenteritis had not changed significantly over time.

Taking into account changes in population size, applying these equivalent methods suggests a 17% decrease in the rate of foodborne gastroenteritis between 2000 and 2010, with considerable overlap of the 90% credible intervals.

In the United States, where people eat outside the home frequently, 58% of cases originate from commercial food facilities (2004 FoodNet data).

[citation needed] Often, a combination of events contributes to an outbreak, for example, food might be left at room temperature for many hours, allowing bacteria to multiply which is compounded by inadequate cooking which results in a failure to kill the dangerously elevated bacterial levels.

[citation needed] In Aberdeen, in 1964, a large-scale (>400 cases) outbreak of typhoid occurred, caused by contaminated corned beef which had been imported from Argentina.

Those meats were eaten by people in Aberdeen who then became ill.[citation needed] Serious outbreaks of foodborne illness since the 1970s prompted key changes in UK food safety law.

The deaths of 21 people in the 1996 Wishaw outbreak of E. coli O157[90][91] was a precursor to the establishment of the Food Standards Agency which, according to Tony Blair in the 1998 white paper A Force for Change Cm 3830, "would be powerful, open and dedicated to the interests of consumers".

The focus was on the handling of raw chicken in the home and in catering facilities in a drive to reduce the high levels of food poisoning from the campylobacter bacterium.

Anne Hardy argues that widespread public education of food hygiene can be useful, particularly through media (TV cookery programmes) and advertisement.

[93] In 2001, the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the United States Department of Agriculture to require meat packers to remove spinal cords before processing cattle carcasses for human consumption, a measure designed to lessen the risk of infection by variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.

These methods provide efficient, science-based tools to improve food safety, thereby benefiting both public health and economic development.

This is done by:[citation needed] Membership to INFOSAN is voluntary, but is restricted to representatives from national and regional government authorities and requires an official letter of designation.