Foodborne illnesses should not be a major medical problem in the developed world. The United States has one of the most sophisticated health care systems in the world and several federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, that work to keep the food supply free from contamination. The system does not always work as well as expected. The records for reporting foodborne illnesses among the 50 states a
re uneven. Obviously, health care problems cannot be mitigated or eliminated if they cannot be systematically analyzed.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest reviewed ten years of records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine which states do a good job of detecting outbreaks of foodborne illness in a study titled All Over the Map: A 10-Year Review of State Outbreak Reporting. The study looked at the track records of each state based on its ability to detect outbreaks. That does not mean a state has more or fewer outbreaks than other states.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest rated all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with grades of “A” through “F.” The states with better records for reporting problems are, by the study’s definition, those with better health care resources. That may not be the only interpretation of the data, but it is the one the CSPI has elected to take. Unfortunately, the study is flawed at its foundation because the methodology and data gathering do not include state budgets for contaminated food detection and does not take into account that there is no really accurate measurement of total foodborne illness outbreaks. There is no way to analyze something which has not been reported but could have been. The CSPI study is the best of its kind, but is still flawed.

Among the mitigating factors of the survey’s results are that states with hotter climates tend to have more outbreaks because of the heat. These same states usually do poorly in the study. Several do a bad job, it seems, of detecting a problem which effects them more frequently than it does colder states.

The study also indicates that the ability to identify foodborne problems fluxuates significantly from states to other states which share common borders. Florida and Georgia get much different ratings, as do Maryland and West Virginia. Does that mean the successful states have more well-trained or more well-funded disease control bureaucrats? That seems to be the case.

This 24/7 Wall St. analysis creates a State Food Poising Index. We have used the CSPI’s survey to rank the states based on how well each detects foodborne problems and then “solves” the outbreaks by identifying the pathogens and the source of the illnesses: