Food-borne illnesses carry big price tag; 3.2 million Ohio cases, national study estimates

By Kaye Spector

Plain Dealer Health and Medical Writer

 

Ohio has an estimated 3.2 million cases of food-borne illnesses annually, 762,000 of which originate from eating produce, says a wide-ranging study released today.

Nationwide, the study by the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University estimates some 76 million American are sickened from consuming contaminated food annually, resulting in 5,000 deaths.

These food-borne illnesses, such as salmonella and e. coli, also cost Ohioans an estimated $5.8 billion a year in health care spending and quality-of-life losses.

That ranks Ohio seventh in the nation; when calculated per capita, it’s 18th.

The study, authored by Ohio State University assistant professor and former Food and Drug Administration economist Robert Scharff, is the first-ever estimate of the financial burden of food-borne illness state by state.

“In public health,” said Jim O’Hara, Produce Safety Project director, “it is critical to have a measure of the problem you are trying to attack.”

The report’s scope is the most sweeping to date.

As the basis of their modeling, researchers used CDC data on 27 bacterial, viral, parasitic and unknown pathogens.

The most cited data until now had been a 15-year-old FDA study that looked at just five pathogens.

Also, because health officials believe that much food poisoning goes unreported, the incidence numbers include a calculation that for every case recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20 go unreported, Scharff said.

The calculation of loss includes measures such as “quality of life,” death, pain and suffering, and functional disability. These factors have never before been taken into account.

This enlarged scope puts the nation’s price tag for health-related costs of food-borne illness at $152 billion a year.

That’s up to five times the government’s previous estimates, which have ranged from $6.9 billion to $35 billion annually.

“It really illustrates how serious food-borne illness is as a problem in our society,” Scharff said during a press briefing Tuesday, hosted by Make Our Food Safe. The coalition includes American Public Health Association, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumers Union and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The coalition hopes to put pressure on the U.S. Senate to pass comprehensive food-safety legislation. In July, The U.S. House passed its food-safety bill, which includes new regulations and reporting mandates.

“It’s important to families to know they have purchased food that isn’t going to harm their family in some way,” said U.S Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut.

“If people can’t engage in the humanitarian aspect, maybe they are willing to listen on the economic issues,” she said.