How many people actually become ill from food poisoning and how many people die?
There are different ways of trying to measure the number of cases of food poisoning – none of them give the complete picture. Our Consumer Attitudes to Food Survey 2001 shows what consumers say their experience has been in the past year. Not all of the people who say they have had food poisoning will have had it, and not all of the cases will have been caused by the food they suspect. But this survey provides an indication both of the level of public concern and possible scale. This survey suggests that around 5.5 million people in the UK suffer from food poisoning each year and, among these, 4.2 million believe that their illness was caused by food eaten outside the home. (The 5.5 million figure was calculated by multiplying the total percentage of respondents to the nationally representative Consumer Attitudes to Food survey 2001 who said they had experienced food poisoning in the past year, by the most recent figure for UK population aged over 16 years. [The population figure was pr
