Food Safety. Section Navigation. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Syndicate. Foodborne Germs and Illnesses. Minus Related Pages. Causes of Food Poisoning Many different disease-causing germs can contaminate foods, so there are many different foodborne infections also called foodborne disease or food poisoning.
Researchers have identified more than foodborne diseases. Most of them are infections, caused by a variety of bacteria, viruses, and parasites. That year also saw roughly , people sick from contaminated milk. Possibly the most infamous outbreak, known as the Jack in the Box incident, happened in , and four children died from E.
Nearly every day now you can read news about another foodborne illness outbreak or food recall somewhere in the U. Already in there have been eight major multi-state investigations done by the CDC, and countless other reports of localized illness. Every year the CDC estimates that about one in six people will contract a foodborne illness.
Most likely we will all have had at least one in our lifetimes, most likely more. Throughout history , there has been a multitude of sicknesses deriving from food. In the final update published by the CDC, 33 deaths and one miscarriage were reported in total. An outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter and peanut paste occurred in , spanned 46 states, and caused illnesses and nine deaths.
In , an outbreak occurred due to E. Deli meat was responsible for an outbreak of listeria , causing eight deaths and three stillbirths in Lastly, in , hospitalizations and twenty-one deaths resulted from listeria contamination of hot dogs. The year has been rampant with salmonella outbreaks, as well as those caused by E. Again, as the U. In the twentieth century, the environmental concerns of Victorian public health reformers were balanced by a sharper focus on the individual.
The realization that humans were typhoid carriers in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the notorious case of Typhoid Mary Mallon in the USA, drew attention to the importance of personal hygiene within the wider field of public health. Typhoid Mary was a cook who was identified in as a healthy carrier of typhoid germs.
Her condition was discovered following repeated outbreaks of the disease among the families she worked for, and as a result of her subsequent intransigent neglect of personal hygiene, she was eventually detained in solitary confinement for life. She subsequently entered the public health canon as an awful warning against unhygienic personal behaviours. Consequently, the registration and management of known typhoid carriers became general policy in the US, and commercial food handlers in many states became subject to regular vetting for carrier status.
In Britain, however, while such intrusions into personal liberty might be wistfully contemplated, they were not introduced, at least until the introduction of a blood test circa made it practical to screen typhoid patients for carrier status before discharge from hospital. The new Public Health Laboratory Service began to compile a register of typhoid carriers from Efforts to control food poisoning prevention in Britain have historically focused on public education, especially of commercial food handlers.
Popular responses to the Chicken Challenge campaign suggest little has changed. Meanwhile, education in personal hygiene among commercial food handlers, proved a similarly uphill task. Efforts were directed instead towards applying standards for environmental hygiene, including inspection techniques, stricter regulations on building construction practices, and on sanitation facilities provided.
Despite best efforts, the food industries in the 21 st century remain vulnerable, as repeated outbreaks of norovirus infections linked even to world-class restaurants, such those in Heston Blumenthal restaurants in and , make very clear. Given the continuing problems with food poisoning, not eased by the discovery of a whole new range of agents since the later s — campylobacter, cryptosporidium, norovirus, hepatitis strains, e.
It was a question which he made no attempt to answer. But it is clear from the experience of other countries, notably of the Nordic states, that food poisoning is not a necessary hazard of modern life-styles. Although food-poisoning outbreaks do occur in Scandinavia, the numerous small-scale, un-related incidents which characterise the British experience are absent.
These constitute a chronic burden of illness and small-scale fatalities among the British population. In Norway, Sweden, and Finland most cases of salmonellosis are imported, not created by bad practices within the country. Denmark has in recent years made considerable strides in reducing Salmonella infections by instituting a control programme for broiler chickens, layer hens, and pigs, and has recently turned its attention to Campylobacter.
Being a small and well-organised country is evidently a help in gaining control — but so is a food-culture which in Scandinavia still favours home-cooking over ready meals, take-aways, and even frozen food. Standards of personal and public hygiene in Scandinavia have also been considerably higher than in Britain at least since the end of the nineteenth century.
Whilst Scandinavian schools were being constructed with appropriate provision of lavatories and handwashing facilities from the s onwards; the journal Public Health noted as recently as , that many British many schools still lacked such provision. Ultimately, the prevention of food poisoning comes down to the practice of effective personal hygiene by each individual. That proper facilities are provided is crucially important — as is the underlying imperative of effective sanitary education to ensure their use.
Home education in childhood seems to provide the key to engraining sanitary habits. American women, it has been argued, learned their sanitary lessons from Florence Nightingale, whose Notes on Nursing — a guide for homes, not hospitals — was published in the US in and achieved a wide circulation.
When Civil War erupted the following year, American womenfolk, mindful of the recent terrible sufferings of soldiers in the Crimean War, adopted sanitary practices in both the field hospitals and the home — and no doubt educated their families.
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