Study Finds Many Small Foodborne Disease Outbreaks May Go Undetected In US Every Year

Healio (1/29, Feller) reports, “Researchers estimated that hundreds of small foodborne disease outbreaks may go undetected in the United States each year, based on a statistical analysis of data from the last 2-plus decades.” In the study, published by the CDC in Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers “found that foodborne disease outbreak data fits a power law distribution, statistical distribution in which one variable is proportional to the power of another variable – in this case showing that large outbreaks are rare, but small outbreaks are more common and, historically, have gone underreported.”