Official statistics are not always easy to find. So here are some statistics on salmonella, as it was apparently claimed in Parliament that the US does much better than the UK in terms of salmonella-deaths. (Thread)
So: here’s UK data from public health England. Page 11 lists: 0 food-related salmonella deaths in the UK in 2016. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
US statistics are kept by the CDC. It reports that there are about 420 deaths every year from salmonella in the US. Food is the source for most of the outbreaks. cdc.gov/salmonella/ind…
The CDC also keeps annual records, but they don’t focus on deaths. If you’re interested, here’s the 2016 one. cdc.gov/nationalsurvei…
So the UK clearly is doing better than the US. What about other EU countries. Germany compiles a neat overall statistic on food-born outbreak and - yes - lists 2 salmonella related deaths (it also breaks the stats down into good evidence (2 deaths) and poor evidence cases (0))
Yes, Germany’s population is smaller than the US, but it’s roughly 1/4, so 8 US deaths would be the equivalent. Not (hmm) 420. Here’s the report bvl.bund.de/SharedDocs/Ber…
Food standards are not necessarily the cause of what’s going on here. A poor health system, different dietary habits - there’s several reasons you can come up with. But citing the US as doing better based on these statistics seems peculiar.
