ATLANTA — Americans didn’t suffer more food poisoning last year despite high-profile outbreaks involving peanut butter, pot pies and other foods.
But it’s not getting better, either. Although there have been significant declines in certain food-borne illnesses since the late 1990s, all the improvements occurred before 2004, federal health officials said in a report released Thursday.
A food-safety advocacy group called the report discouraging.
“We don’t consider this a success at all. We want to see these numbers going down,” said Nancy Donley, president of Safe Tables Our Priority, which was founded by victims of food poisoning.
The new numbers were collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It partners with state health departments to check labs in 10 states to count confirmed food poisonings caused by intestinal bugs.
Salmonella remained the most common cause of food poisoning, causing about 6,800 lab-confirmed illnesses. That translates to a rate of about 15 cases for every 100,000 people. Most experts say those numbers are lower than reality, however, because only a fraction of food-poisoning cases get reported or confirmed by laboratories.
The researchers don’t address how many people died. But in general, the CDC estimates that 76 million people get sick, more than 300,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 Americans die each year from food- borne illness.
The new research appears in Thursday’s issue of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The most prominent food- borne illness outbreaks in 2007 included:
• ConAgra’s recall of peanut-butter products after its Peter Pan peanut butter was linked to a salmonella outbreak that sickened at least 625 people in 47 states.
• ConAgra recalled its frozen Banquet pot pies after they were linked to at least 272 cases of salmonella in 35 states.
• At least eight people were reported ill from botulism after eating canned hot dog chili sauce by Castleberry’s Food Co.
Many food-poisoning cases aren’t linked to outbreaks, and news reports aren’t necessarily a clear gauge of disease prevalence, CDC researchers said.
