How safe is our food? Maybe it's time to rephrase that question: How thorough is our reporting and tracking of food-borne illness outbreaks?
According to Center for Scie nce in the Public Interest
nce in the Public Interest, we have a long way to go. This week, CSPI issued a 75-page report giving letter grades to all 50 states and the District of Columbia for their tracking and solving of outbreaks of food-borne illnesses such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Norovirus. On a scale of A to F, only seven - Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming – scored an A. Those states which pulled an F? A disturbing 14: Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia.
Researchers at CSPI studied individual states' reporting of outbreaks over 10 years, from 1998 to 2007. States were judged by how many outbreaks per one million inhabitants they tracked, and solved. The more outbreaks reported in any given state, the higher the letter grade it received. States that scored B or lower weren't tracking outbreaks as effectively as their higher-scoring counterparts. In other words, the more outbreaks a state recorded, the better it was at tracking those outbreaks.
What does this actually mean for the country as a whole? Local reporting is key to the success and efficiency of battling food-borne outbreaks nationally. Agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control rely upon reporting from city, county, and state agencies to track and fight those outbreaks. In turn, local agencies rely upon local residents to report their own experiences with possible food-borne illnesses. The problem is that many states simply don't have the money to fund those efforts and health and epidemiology departments around the country are often underfunded and understaffed. Another problem, at least statistically: most people don't report illnesses, especially if they seem trivial or pass quickly.
"A March 2010 report from the Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that states around the country have cut $392 million for public health programs in the past year," reported CSPI. "States are expected to cut budgets even more in the coming year, which will leave communities struggling to deliver basic public health services for chronic and infectious disease prevention, food and water safety, emergency preparedness and environmental health improvements (TFAH, 2010). Notably, the majority of funding for public health comes from state and local levels rather than federal spending."
The peak number of reported and solved outbreak cases was in 2001, according to CSPI and it was pretty much downhill after that. The Food Safety Modernization Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Obama last year, calls for increased coordination between various federal, state, and local agencies in the years ahead. Now, of course, there's that pesky funding issue.
What sort of grade did your state receive? Are you surprised? Have you ever reported food poisoning to your local health department?