Foodborne Illness Outbreak

An outbreak of foodborne illness occurs when a group of people consume the same contaminated food and 2 or more of them come down with the same illness.
  • It may be a group that ate a meal together somewhere, or it may be a group of people who do not know each other at all, but who all happened to buy and eat the same contaminated item from a grocery store or restaurant. For an outbreak to occur, something must have happened to contaminate a batch of food that was eaten by a group of people.
  • Often, a combination of events contributes to the outbreak. A contaminated food may be left out a room temperature for many hours, allowing the bacteria to multiply to high numbers, and then be insufficiently cooked to kill the bacteria.

Outbreaks Local in Nature

Many outbreaks are local in nature. They are recognized when a group of people realize that they all became ill after a common meal, and someone calls the local health department. This classic local outbreak might follow a catered meal at a reception, a pot-luck supper, or eating a meal at an understaffed restaurant on a particularly busy day. However, outbreaks are increasingly being recognized that are more widespread, that affect persons in many different places, and that are spread out over several weeks.
  • For example, a recent outbreak of salmonellosis was traced to persons eating a breakfast cereal produced at a factory in Minnesota, and marketed under several different brand names in many different states. No one county or state had very many cases and the cases did not know each other. The outbreak was recognized because it was caused by an unusual strain of Salmonella, and because state public health laboratories that type Salmonella strains noticed a sudden increase in this one rare strain.
  • In another recent outbreak, a particular peanut snack food caused the same illness in Israel, Europe, and North America. Again, this was recognized as an increase in infections caused by a rare strain of Salmonella.
The vast majority of reported cases of foodborne illness are not part of recognized outbreaks, but occurs as individual or "sporadic" cases. It may be that many of these cases are actually part of unrecognized widespread or diffuse outbreaks. Detecting and investigating such widespread outbreaks is a major challenge to our public health system. This is the reason that new and more sophisticated laboratory methods are being used at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and in state public health department laboratories.

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