FDA Study Finds Foodborne Illness Risk Factors Not Properly Being Addressed

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced a sweeping 10-year program to decrease foodborne illness in the US by improving food preparation practices and individual employee behaviors at institutional, restaurant and retail food outlets. The effort was prompted by the results of 17,000 food safety inspection observations showing that widespread foodborne illness risk factors were not being properly addressed.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as many as 33 million people suffer from foodborne illness every year in the United States, nine thousand of whom die. The FDA’s Healthy People 2010, a national health promotion and disease prevention initiative with the objective of improving the health of all Americans, is aiming to reduce such cases by 25 percent by October 1, 2010.

One of the most startling statistics revealed by the study is that 70 percent of full-service restaurants surveyed do not properly sanitize food preparation surfaces and equipment. Additionally, one-third of all retail seafood departments and two-thirds of produce departments surveyed fail to do the same. As such, the FDA has made surface disinfection a priority health concern requiring immediate attention.

The FDA also identified poor personal hygiene and improper holding times and temperatures as risk factors in need of great attention. The study found that half of restaurants and retail food outlets do not store their foods at the proper temperatures or discard them before they might spoil. Forty percent of hospitals are out of compliance for this risk factor as well. With respect to personal hygiene, employees at 45 percent of restaurants do not practice proper personal hygiene, such as washing their hands, while on the job.

In order to reduce incidences of foodborne illness, the FDA is enlisting the help of state, local and tribal regulatory agencies to address the risk factors identified in the study. They are encouraging such agencies to review current scientific data and national requirements so that they can properly assess the greatest local risk factors and take the most appropriate corrective action when restaurants, institutions and retail food outlets are out of compliance.

The Water Quality and Health Council and the National Restaurant Association developed a poster to encourage proper sanitization in restaurants. It is available at:

http://www.c3.org/chlorine_knowledge_center/poster.html

For more information on the FDA’s Healthy People 2010 program, visit http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/retrsk.html.