What is The biggest cause of food borne illness?

Answer 1

The WA community has a lot of opinions about the biggest cause of foodborne illness. Here are some of the answers:

• The biggest cause of foodborne illness is poor personal hygiene.
• The biggest cause of foodborne illness is unhygienic conditions. Sometimes food is stored at an improper temperature, or it is not washed correctly, and these two things lead very quickly to bacterial growth that cause food poisoning.
• In terms of causative agents, the largest number of foodborne illnesses in the United States are caused by Camplyobacter. However, in terms of underlying causes, undercooking food and cross-contaminating foods is the largest cause of foodborne illnesses.
• The biggest cause of food borne infection is contamination of food, the commonest form being the oro-fecal route, the vector being finger nails and flies.
• Not washing hands etc when preparing food.
• Cross contamination.
• The biggest cause of foodborne illness is cross contamination mistakes. More notably, when raw meat or poultry, or spoiled products come into contact with the uncontaminated food or equipment.

Answer 2

(reprinted from Dietary Manager, April 2005)

Names of foodborne pathogens are on the tip of every dietary manager's tongue. Yet, if you were asked to name the most common cause of foodborne illness, what would you say? You might want to cite E. coli (STEC), or perhaps Salmonella or Campylobacter or Shigella or Listeria or Bacillus cereus bacteria. But here's the surprise: In sheer case numbers, a virus outranks them all.

The culprit: the Norwalk virus family, now commonly referred to as Noroviruses or NoV. Why, you may ask, don't we hear more about Nororviruses? One answer stems back to basic laboratory science. Remember that the definition of a foodborne illness outbreak stipulates: two or more people become ill after eating the same food, and laboratory analysis confirms the source of the illness. Well, there's the bug (so to speak): Until recently, scientists have lacked definitive techniques for identifying Noroviruses in the laboratory.

Today, there is a better answer, a method called RT-PCR, which singles out a biochemical marker for Noroviruses in the laboratory. New testing is in place, more in some states than others. So, for example, the majority of Norovirus illness reports in the CDC database come from just 11 states. States without the testing capability generally do not report any Norovirus outbreaks to the CDC. This means, say scientists, that the Norovirus reality is a much higher number than we realize.

If every state could accurately pinpoint and report Norovirus illness, the true numbers would be at least half of all foodborne illnesses -- or maybe even more, according to a report in a CDC journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases (January 2005). Remember that the often-cited CDC statistics about foodborne illness name "no identified cause" for a whopping two thirds of illnesses! Researchers suspect that many of these are in fact caused by Norovirus.

Another factor that limits official reporting of Norovirus illness is that many people simply do not report symptoms to health departments. A typical case acts like a short-lived gastrointestinal "flu," which never reaches the attention of health officials at all. (When was the last time you called the health department to inform them you have the "flu"?) While Norovirus does not cause every case of the common gastrointestinal flu, it is probably a leading offender, say the experts.

Answer 3

The number one cause of food borne illness and tends to occur twice on average to people that eat fast food regularily is from bacteria or virus that is passed on by an employee that did not wash their hands after using the bathroom. It is sometimes mistakenly called the stomach flu, but it is not an influenze virus that can be airborne. It is passed through fecal matter and anything coming in contact with it.

Answer 4

The three most common are:

1. Salmonella
2. Staphylococcus
3. E.coli

Answer 5

Vírus