News

Safe Food Handling

According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 76 million U.S. residents experienced food poisoning at some point in the last year. While most of these cases are relatively mild, 325,000 cases were serious enough to warrant hospitalization. Each year, approximately 5,000 cases result in death.

The hardship caused by these incidents has an economic component as well – CDC estimates the total cost of dealing with food-borne illness, including medical care, absences from work, and loss of productivity, to range somewhere between $10 billion and $83 billion per year. Each case of food-borne illness carries an estimated cost between $131 and $1,092, depending on the severity of the incident. CDC reports that each outbreak of food-borne illness affects an average of 19 people.

As restaurants and community-style dining centers become ubiquitous in our daily lives, it is increasingly important to be certain that personnel at these facilities have up-to-date training in safe food-handling practices. To meet this need, Virginia Cooperative Extension has implemented the nationally-acclaimed ServSafe program. In 2007 alone, this program reached over 1,000 food service workers in Virginia, bringing improved knowledge of safe practices to 529 restaurants, schools, and nursing homes.

Community Viability Specialist Matt Benson in the Northern District and Food Science and Technology Assistant Professor Renee Boyer were asked to analyze this training program from an economic standpoint. Benson and Boyer conservatively assumed that each trained and certified person working in a food-service setting would prevent a single 19-case outbreak of illness per year. This estimate resulted in a total economic impact of a savings of between $2,515,030 and $20,874,597 in Virginia alone. In reality, the number of disease outbreaks prevented by a single trained individual could easily be much higher.