We're Not as Sick as We Think

If you asked adults in the U.S. today whether there was more food-borne illness now than 10 years ago, they would all say yes. I would have said yes, too. After all, we hear about it all the time. It has to be happening more frequently, right?

Nah. Check out this graph from today's Star Tribune, which is derived from CDC data. Every type of food-borne bacteria is now found at a lower rate than it was in 1996 except Salmonella, which is just a bit higher, and is lower than it was in some of the intervening years. Campylobacter dropped like a rock between 1997 and 1999, and the E. coli we all fear in our lettuce and hamburger is about 30 percent as frequent now as in 1996.

And think about the numbers represented here, even in the years with the highest levels. 15 cases of Salmonella per 100,000 people in a year. That's one in 6,667 people. Those are pretty bad odds of getting the disease... compared to, say, the likelihood that any one person will get the common cold in a given year, which is probably something like 1 in 2.

I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of these diseases, or to suggest that it's not important to maintain food safety to keep their occurrence low.

But I think we could all use a better understanding of our actual risk.