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Douglas E. Archer, PhD; David A. Kessler, MD
Food and Drug Administration Rockville, Md

JAMA. 1993;269(21):2737.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that food causes 6.5 million acute illnesses and 9000 associated deaths annually¹; other morbidity estimates are substantially higher.² Unlike many infectious diseases, foodborne illness is largely preventable.

The Minnesota Department of Health's studies of foodborne illness offer important lessons. In one study,³ a shigellosis outbreak was traced to food served on a commercial aircraft. This study shows that the simplest rules of preventing foodborne disease, such as good personal hygiene and proper refrigeration of food, are frequently forgotten.

A second article⁴ describes a large, diffuse outbreak of salmonellosis in which the vehicle was commercially shredded cheese, and the causative agents were Salmonella javiana and Salmonella oranienburg. Without historical data on human isolate serotypes and the monitoring of specific serotype isolations by epidemiologists, this outbreak could have been overlooked.

Both these articles make clear that . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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