Are the types of food-borne diseases changing?
A. Many of the diseases that were serious killers in other centuries are no longer an issue in the US. Better sanitation of food and water, childhood vaccination, improvements in food processing, such as pasteurization and canning, and increased government surveillance have all contributed to the elimination of epidemic diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, and polio. However, the globalization of the marketplace, changes in eating habits, increased dining out have exposed us to new pathogens. Longer life spans and the AIDs epidemic have increased the population of persons who at-risk to serious disease, and the abuse of antibiotics has led to strains of bacteria that may be untreatable even in healthy persons. Many “new” diseases have probably been around for a very long time, but increased knowledge of infectious disease has allowed medical science to ascertain the cause of food-borne infections whose origins were previously unknown.
