In Wednesday’s Dispatch, ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross commented on the new Food Safety and Modernization Act that was recently approved by the Senate. Dean O. Cliver, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, calls attention to an interesting point:
The figures you quote (especially 5000 deaths) were guestimates in a 10-year-old CDC publication. For a recent speaking engagement, I compared their 1999 estimate for food-borne disease deaths with other data from CDC. Granted that all are subject to under-reporting, I think it is noteworthy that far more Americans are reported dying of malnutrition (= starvation) or even choking on food than die from food-borne illness. As one of my colleagues says, "Eating is always hazardous, but not eating is always fatal." I believe that hunger is the greatest food safety problem in the US.
Based on our own research, we discovered that the CDC reported a total of 74 deaths from food-borne illness in 2009; however, this does not account for the vast discrepancy between Dr. Cliver’s statistics and the ones quoted in our Dispatch item. “Perhaps it’s time for the accepted statistic we’ve read about numerous times to be revised,” says Dr. Ross.
