Volume 1

Food safety : fourth report / Agriculture Committee.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Agriculture Committee.
Date:
1998
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Food safety : fourth report / Agriculture Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Microbiological Food Poisoning and its Prevention. We recommend these sources for Members and others wishing to inform themselves in detail of the underlying trends in food poisoning in the UK. For the purposes of this Report, we draw attention to those issues which appear to us to be of most significance and concern. . The most recent figures for food poisoning notifications, for 1997, show a continuation of the overall increase which has been observed since the 1980s. In England and Wales provisional figures for 1997 show a rate of 179.6 per 100,000 population, up from 160 in 1996 and from 58.3 ten years previously, in 1987'°. There has been a slight, though probably not statistically significant, decrease in notifications in Scotland, from 199.6 per 100,000 population in 1996 to 198.6 in 1997, and a small rise in Northern Ireland, from 87.5 in 1996 to 91.8 in 1997'®. For the first time, in 1997, there were more than 100,000 food poisoning notifications in the UK. The PHLS informed us that each year hundreds of people in the UK are hospitalized with food poisoning and “between 100 and 200 may die”’. 18. There has been some speculation about the reasons for the apparent divergences in rates of food poisoning between different parts of the UK, and in particular the relatively high rate in Scotland (most marked in terms of E.coli 0157 food poisoning) and the relatively low rate in Northern Ireland. Some witnesses offered hunches. Mr Richard Carden, Head of MAFF’s Food Safety and Environment Directorate, said that “it may have something to do with lifestyle and the amount of eating out and the things that people eat”'*. Professor Hugh Pennington, on the other hand, felt that, in relation to Scottish levels of E.coli O1S7 it was worth looking at the hypothesis that there might be higher levels of carriage of the pathogen in cattle in Scotland”. He also pointed out that there were unexplained regional variations in E.coli O157 incidence within Scotland itself’. The Government’s existing research programme into pathogenic micro- organisms does not appear capable of providing much illumination on this subject?'. We recognize that there may be a mixture of factors at play: agricultural and food industry practices, social and cultural norms about diet and food preparation, and, possibly, differential reporting and investigation rates for foodborne illnesses. Nevertheless, the trends are well-established and pronounced, and it cannot be the case that Northern Ireland is simply more fortunate, and Scotland less fortunate, than England and Wales. We recommend that the Government explore means of devising research projects to provide a fuller understanding of the different rates of food poisoning in the constituent parts of the UK. The absence of clear conclusions on these discrepancies is inexcusable, and must be remedied if the Agency’s work is to be underpinned by a real understanding of the incidence and causes of food poisoning in the UK. 19. Before food poisoning cases can enter the national notification statistics, they must surmount a number of hurdles, and at each hurdle an unknown number of cases falls by the wayside. First, many people, probably the large majority, do not visit their doctors, usually because their symptoms are mild or pass quickly. Secondly, though doctors throughout the UK are statutorily required to notify cases of food poisoning (in England and Wales, to the local authority; in Scotland to the area Health Board; and in Northern Ireland, to the local Health and Social Services Board”’), it is thought that there is a substantial degree of under-reporting by doctors”*. The best estimate of the extent of under-reporting is provided by data from the GP Sentinel Practice Scheme, which records the number of GP consultations for infectious intestinal disease (IID). In 1997 there was a mean annual incidence for such consultations of 2,420 per 100,000 population, twenty-four times the figure for formal food poisoning notification by doctors and thirteen times the total number of notifications (which include cases ascertained by i] 15 16 17 18 19 Appendix 90 ibid Ev p 81 Q 12 Q 1402 © Q 1403 21 Q 13 2 Ev pp 7-8 ft Ev p9