Compared
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2006 to 2008
report, the vibrio increase was the biggest among the six pathogens
tracked by the agency. Despite the sharp increase in vibrio infections,
the pathogen only accounted for 55 hospitalizations and two deaths in
2013—like many food-borne illnesses, vibrio typically causes diarrhea,
which can be serious in the immune-compromised, the elderly, or
children.
Overall, America’s food safety grades show very little progress has been made in the fight to keep our food safe from pathogens.
A
tiny bright spot in the report shows a modest 9 percent decline in
salmonella infections. But reading the numbers can get tricky; despite
declining numbers, salmonella caused 2,003 hospitalizations and 27
deaths last year.
Then there’s
E. coli. There was no significant change in the E. coli strains
tracked, but the CDC was frank in its warning about the pathogen.
“We could be losing ground on past progress in E. coli reduction,” according to the report.Overall in 2013, FoodNet, the collaboration between the CDC, 10 state health departments, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, and the FDA found that more than 19,000 infections, 4,200 hospitalizations, and 80 deaths stemmed from the pathogens it tracks, and that young children were often the most affected.
Those are just the reported numbers. For each pathogen, the CDC estimates the number of cases that go unreported. For example, for every Yersinia case reported, 123 cases are not diagnosed. For every salmonella case, 29 go undiagnosed. For every vibrio case reported, 142 cases are not reported.
Even the CDC admits that most food-borne illnesses can be prevented. Why?
Urvashi
Rangan, Ph.D., director of the Consumer Safety Group at Consumer
Reports, says part of the reason is that the U.S. hasn’t made enough
progress on standards for meat or on the use of antibiotics that can
affect pathogen resistance; she points to last year’s Foster Farm
outbreak as an example. The USDA's lack of standards for chicken parts
is part of the problem, Rangan said.
“We
should have standards in place for all meat at this point, and
strengthen them over time to get a meaningful reduction in
contamination,” Rangan said. “And we need to deal with the virulence and
resistance of pathogens and stop teasing them with antibiotics used in
agriculture.”
Dr. Robert
Tauxe, deputy director of CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and
Environmental Diseases, also pointed out another snag in the efforts to
curb food-borne illnesses—changes in the diagnostic tests used by
laboratories that allow health officials to trace food-borne outbreaks
across state lines.
Laboratories
are increasingly relying on less expensive, rapid non-culture tests.
That means collecting stool samples from sick patients may not be
needed. While that can be a benefit to both doctors and patients, for
health officials who track disease, the shift in laboratory testing
means they’re not always able to get the DNA fingerprint they need to
trace an outbreak to its source.
It’s a problem health officials have been aware of for several years.
“This trend will challenge our ability to monitor trends and detect outbreaks," says Tauxe.
Maryn McKenna, author of Superbug, has also written that not having a cultured organism also means losing the ability to detect when the food-borne illness is antibiotic-resistant. She writes:
Antibiotic
resistance is an increasingly important issue for food production; the
now year-long outbreak in chicken from Foster Farms, which has racked up
524 infections in 25 states, involves a Salmonella that is multi-drug
resistant. No longer being able to track resistance could mean
completely losing track of foodborne epidemics.
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