Update: Poultry major source of food borne diseases
The recently released report from the CDC on food borne illnesses needs some in depth interpretation to draw the right conclusions.
The report suggests that poultry is the single leading cause of outbreaks of foodborne illness, with poultry responsible for 21% of outbreak-related cases.
This is based on attributing 1,355 cases to poultry out of a total of 6,395 cases (21.1%). However, of the total cases attributed to poultry, 741 stemmed from a single incident in an Alabama jail or prison in March 2006 which is suspected (but not confirmed, according to a publicly available CDC database) to result from Clostridium perfringens in baked chicken.
Without this single incident, poultry would account for 614 of 5,653 cases, or 10.9%. This would place poultry well behind other commodities mentioned in the report.
See also:
Join 31,000+ subscribers
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated about all the need-to-know content in the poultry sector, three times a week.
