FDA tracking 17 active outbreaks

The Food and Drug Administration has a running account of what is making Americans sick right now. The FDA’s Investigations of Foodborne Illness Outbreaks table is updated weekly.

Right now FDA’s table carries seventeen investigations in its Active section. Run down each file and add the case counts the agency publishes on the individual advisories, and the table describes 7,324 illnesses, 394 hospitalizations where a number is given, and three deaths — two from Cyclospora in Michigan and one from Listeria in the soft cheese outbreak. Eleven of the seventeen are ongoing. Six are files where FDA itself says the outbreak is over.

Here is the whole table as it stands today.

Eleven of the seventeen show no on-site inspection initiated. The six investigations that did get an inspection are, every one of them, a firm standing on American soil. The frozen blueberry file shows what has taken the place of an inspection when the firm is not: FDA ran a remote regulatory assessment of the Chilean supplier, collected records, and added the company to an import alert. A records review conducted over the internet is now what stands in for walking the ground.