A consumer and public health group has released a new report that proposes acute foodborne illnesses cost the nation an estimated $152 billion per year in healthcare, workplace and other economic losses: the report also suggests that $39 billion of these costs (more than a quarter) are due to foodborne illnesses linked to fresh, canned and processed produce.
The Produce Safety Project (PSP), based at Georgetown University in Washington DC, released their new report titled Health-Related Costs from Foodborne Illness in the United States on Tuesday. The author is Dr. Robert L Scharff, an economist previously with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and who is now an assistant professor in the department of consumer sciences at Ohio State University in Columbus.
Scharff told the media that the report shows more complete estimates of the health-related cost of foodborne illness in the US, that come from:
“Summing both medical costs (hospital services, physician services, and drugs) and quality-of-life losses (deaths, pain, suffering, and functional disability) for each of the major pathogens associated with foodborne illness.”
“This cost includes both expenses to the person made ill such as pain and suffering losses and costs to others in society such as outlays by insurance companies that pay medical expenses,” he added.
The report argues that a widely cited figure of $6.9 billion a year arising out of a US Department of Agriculture (DAO) study under-estimates the economic cost of foodborne illness because it only covers five pathogens and does not account for the “substantial pain and suffering costs that accompany a case of foodborne illness”.
In contrast, according to a statement in the report’s summary, its new estimates take into account “foodborne illnesses from all sources” and use “a more comprehensive measure of economic cost”.
Thus the report suggests that the “best estimate of the health-related economic cost of foodborne illness in the United States is approximately $152 billion”, which equates to around $1,850 per illness. Even if you take out the costs attributed to “pain and suffering losses from acute illnesses”, the cost to society is $103 billion, it says.
The US currently has no nationwide safety standards for fresh fruits and vegetables, something the PSP wants to see addressed.
To arrive at his estimates, Scharff used the same economic principles currently used by FDA and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) economists, and to account for uncertainty he used confidence intervals and sensitivity analysis.
He calculated cost of foodborne illness at both an aggregate level and a pathogen-specific level.
The report suggests that fresh, canned and processed produce accounts for nearly 20 million of documented reported illnesses.
The analysis includes a cost per pathogen that reflects both its severity and incidence.
For instance, the total cost per case for Listeria monocytogenes is higher than that of the less severe Campylobacter. And even though the latter causes more than 400 times the number of cases per year than the former, the total economic cost to the nation of Campylobacter is only half that of the more severe pathogen.
The report includes data at the state level as well as the national level and shows differences in costs per case. For example, taking into account differences in number of illnesses as well as medical costs per illness, “Hawaii faces a cost per case more than $200 greater than Kentucky”, says the report.
The states most affected by foodborne illness cases related to produce are California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
The FDA said that by the end of this year they will be proposing mandatory and enforceable safety standards for growing, harvesting and packaging of fresh produce.
PSP director Jim O’Hara told the media that:
“An up-to-date cost analysis of foodborne illnesses is critical for FDA officials and lawmakers to craft the most effective and efficient reforms.”
“A decade ago, we spent more than $1.3 billion annually to try to reduce the burden of foodborne illness and today we are spending even more. We need to make certain we are spending limited funds wisely and hitting our target of reducing sicknesses and deaths, and this study gives us a yardstick to measure our progress,” he added.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 76 million cases of foodborne illness occur each year, including 300,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.
Health-Related Costs from Foodborne Illness in the United States: Full report (PDF)
Source: Food Safety Project.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD