U.S. Health Officials Launch Food Poison Campaign

The patient has classic symptoms of food poisoning – nausea, diarrhea, some stomach cramps. It will probably clear up in a few days. Nothing to be excited about, the doctor decides.

The patient has classic symptoms of food poisoning – nausea, diarrhea, some stomach cramps. It will probably clear up in a few days. Nothing to be excited about, the doctor decides. But U.S. health officials and the American Medical Association says maybe doctors should start getting interested in such cases. The AMA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an education campaign on Wednesday aimed at encouraging doctors, nurses and patients to look more carefully at cases of possible food poisoning. With 5,000 people a year dying of foodborne illness in the United States alone and 76 million getting sick from it, it is a growing problem, they say. And now that the threat of bioterrorism is considered to be greater than ever before, health officials need to know quickly about outbreaks. “Last year’s outbreak of hepatitis A in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania was eventually traced to contaminated green onions imported from Mexico and served at a chain restaurant,” said Dr. Cecil Wilson, an AMA trustee from Winter Park, Florida. “In Pennsylvania alone, there were 555 cases of foodborne illness linked to the green onions and, sadly, three people died.” Each case on its own may have looked unremarkable to a doctor or a nurse. The health officials say they want these health workers to notify state health departments who may be able to connect the dots. And after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and the anthrax letter attacks that followed, intentional poisoning is a risk that worries officials. “In addition, imported foods and increased travel abroad have increased the risk of exposure to foreign pathogens dramatically,” Wilson said at a news conference. EDUCATING DOCTORS AND NURSES The AMA, CDC, FDA and USDA are distributing a “primer” aimed at educating health workers about food poisoning, but say they would like to see a general change in attitude. “We certainly hope this will encourage and empower physicians on the front line,” said Dr. Art Liang, director of the CDC’s food safety initiative. Lab tests that would not normally be ordered could be useful in identifying patterns of food-related illness, he said. “We can use that information in ways that we couldn’t before,” Liang said. Genetic fingerprinting can now help track an organism to its source, and perhaps get tainted food from the same source recalled before it can make anyone else sick. Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s food safety and security director, said it was also important to recognize that foodborne illness can have more than the “classic” symptoms. “It could be something much more subtle,” he said, including meningitis caused by Listeria or paralysis caused by botulinum poisoning. “This whole country is re-introducing itself to the concept of public health. It is important not only to identify that disease based on symptoms the patient has and to treat them, but to consider the broader population as well,” said Wilson. Plus, while cholera and typhoid are diseases of the past in the United States, new pathogens such as E. coli O157 – a mutant killer form of a normally harmless bacterium – have emerged. Liang said there are now more than 200 known possible causes of food poisoning. Liang said 50 percent to 80 percent of all cases of possible food poisoning are never identified, which suggests unknown causes.(Source: Reuters Health, April 2004)