The SIRA Imperative: Food Safety

• In a 1997 article, the American Meat Institute quoted a CDC report expressing that 79% of foodborne illness was bacterial and that improper holding temperature and poor personal hygiene of food handlers, respectively, contributed most to disease incidence.
• A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study titled, "Food Related Illness and Death in the United States" (1999), revealed 76 million outbreaks of foodborne illness, 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospitalizations occurred that year. The economic cost of those illnesses was estimated as 5-17 billion dollars in direct medical expenses, lost wages and productivity.
• As the World Health Organization cited in a January 2002 report, "in industrialized countries, the percentage of people suffering from foodborne diseases each year has been reported to be up to 30%. In the United States of America, around 76 million cases of foodborne diseases, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, are estimated to occur each year."1 That number works out to approximately one in every four people in the U.S.
• In a 2002, article titled "A Dialogue on Pathogen Reduction", the CDC established that "the most common contributing factor (for pathogen adulteration) at the food preparation stage was poor holding temperatures (73%)."
• Why so?
  Because no product in the food cold chain is completely sterile and contamination rapidly increases when product is without pre-set industry safety action levels or mandated regulatory holding temperatures. "Some bacteria can double their numbers every 20 minutes at temperatures above 40°F. In two hours, these bacteria can become so great in number that they may cause an illness or form toxins that cause illness." USDA Food Safety & Inspection Service (FSIS)
• Subsequently, as stated in a peer-reviewed article in Food Protection Trends published in April 2006, the economic cost of foodborne illness in the United States, "is believed to approach 10-83 billion annually."