In Canada in late 1987 there was an outbreak of an acute illness characterized by gastrointestinal symptoms and unusual neurologic abnormalities among persons who had eaten cultivated mussels. Health departments in Canada solicited reports of this newly recognized illness. A case was defined as the occurrence of gastrointestinal symptoms within 24 hours or of neurologic symptoms within 48 hours of the ingestion of mussels.

Food workers in many settings have been responsible for foodborne disease outbreaks for decades, and there is no indication that this is diminishing. The Committee on Control of Foodborne Illnesses of the International Association for Food Protection was tasked with collecting and evaluating any data on worker-associated outbreaks. A total of 816 reports with 80,682 cases were collected from events that occurred from 1927 until the first quarter of 2006. Most of the outbreaks reviewed were from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia, with relatively few from other parts of the world, indicating the skewed set of data because of availability in the literature or personal contact. Outbreaks were caused by 14 agents: norovirus or probable norovirus (338), Salmonella enterica (151), hepatitis A virus (84), Staphylococcus aureus (53), Shigella spp. (33), Streptococcus Lancefield groups A and G (17), and parasites Cyclospora, Giardia, and Cryptosporidium (23). Streptococcal, staphylococcal, and typhoi...

In this article, the third in a series of several reviewing the role of food workers in 816 foodborne outbreaks, factors contributing to outbreaks and descriptions of different categories of worker...

“Food-borne Disease Prevention and Risk Assessment” is a Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health on understanding how food-borne disease is still a global threat to health today and to be able to target strategies to reduce its prevalence