Methods for the Scripps food disease story

Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Scripps Howard News Service's study of how well America's public health departments handle food illness was based on a little-known annual report of outbreaks prepared by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

State health departments report an average of three or four outbreaks of food poisoning every day to the federal agency through the Electronic Food-borne Outbreak Reporting System, part of a nationwide computer-reporting network. The CDC defines an "outbreak" as two or more people who got sick or died after eating the same food.

For many years, the CDC's Outbreak Response and Surveillance Team has gathered these reports of multiple food poisonings from all 50 states, Guam and the District of Columbia.

Scripps took the most recent five years of outbreak reports, covering the years 2000 through 2004, and entered the information into a statistical database. There were 6,374 illness outbreaks reported during that period affecting 127,066 people. The CDC does not disclose how many of those people died.

Among the information collected was the type of disease involved, the state in which the outbreak occurred, the number of people sickened by food, whether the food poisoning occurred at a restaurant, private home or other location, and the kind of food suspected as being the "vehicle" that transmitted the illness.

The files were summarized by state to calculate how often epidemiologists around the nation succeed or fail in diagnosing the cause of food illness. Wisconsin had the best record, diagnosing 90 percent of its outbreaks. Alabama had the worst, diagnosing only 5 percent.

The number of people sickened was also summarized by state. The rate at which people are reported sick _ how many per 100,000 population _ was calculated to determine which states do a good or poor job at detecting illness outbreaks.

The best in the nation is the District of Columbia, where 179 persons per 100,000 population were diagnosed as suffering from an outbreak of food illness. The worst was Kentucky, which reported only four outbreaks involving just 35 people in a five-year period. That state reported less than one person per 100,000 population.

The national average is about 44 people per 100,000 population.

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