English: Demonstration of bad food hygeine in stored foodstuffs in a refrigerator (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report – there is a new program being tested that officials can use to uncover food born illnesses that otherwise may go undetected.
In the project, inspectors combed through Yelp using a software program designed at Columbia University to seek out reviews that mentioned foodborne illness. Yelp set up a private data feed that provided its publicly available reviews in an easy-to-search format.
“We have a lot of reviewers and a lot of restaurants in New York, which made this a good place to try it out,” Balter said.
About half of all local food-poisoning outbreaks occur at restaurants, according to the CDC.
The New York program evaluated about 294,000 restaurant reviews over a nine-month period. Balter said it looked for evidence of potential food-poisoning outbreaks in the reviews, including:
- Keywords indicating illness.
- Cases of two or more people reported ill at one restaurant.
- Reports that indicated enough time had passed that an illness could have been caused by a foodborne bacteria, and not some other cause.
The software ended up identifying 468 potential cases of recent food poisoning, of which only 15 had been reported to the nonemergency 311 line dedicated to reporting such cases, Balter said.
Upon further investigation, health inspectors verified three small outbreaks from those cases and launched investigations.
The three outbreaks involved a December 2012 meal in which a house salad caused seven out of nine people in a party to get sick; a January 2013 meal of shrimp and lobster cannelloni that sickened three of five people in a party; and a March 2013 meal of macaroni and cheese spring rolls that caused all six people in a party to get sick.
The outbreaks occurred due to problems like cross-contamination, bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food, improper food storage and improperly sanitized work surfaces, the inspectors found.
The inspectors suspect these outbreaks likely sickened even more people than were identified. “We assume when we do outbreak investigations that there were other people who got sick we didn’t know about,” Balter said.
For more on foodborne illness outbreaks, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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So glad you stopped by the Four Seasons party! I enjoyed reading your post on foodborne illness. I worked in a local public health department for 20 years before retiring and we had several major foodborne illness outbreaks and they were always so frustrating because they were all preventable. Loved your granola cookie recipe too! Hope you stop by next week.
Terri Henkels´s last blog post ..Toffee Cookies with Heath Pieces & Bits – The Perfect Cookie
Thanks Terri! I’m looking forward to spending more time on your site.