Atlanta, GA - Eight million Americans got food poisoning last year, federal health officials estimated , most from a bacteria that usually taints chicken.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said a new reporting program called FoodNet, in place in two states and parts of three others, identified 8,576 laboratory-confirmed cases of food poisoning from seven common bacteria in 1997.
The surveillance program, in Minnesota, Oregon and parts of California, Connecticut and Georgia, covered about 6% of the U.S. population last year.
Researchers found that 50 cases of the seven predominantly food-borne infections were diagnosed per 100,000 people, or an estimated total of 130,000 culture-confirmed cases in the entire U.S. population.
"We think it's a pretty good reflection of what's happening throughout the United States," said Dr. Patricia Griffin of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases.
Based on other studies of the prevalence of the food-borne illness, CDC researchers said the new data suggested that "about 8 million cases of these bacterial infections occurred in 1997 in the United States."
Campylobacter was the most frequently detected organism, accounting for 3,974 cases. Illness from the spiral-shaped bacteria is usually associated with handling raw poultry or eating raw or undercooked poultry meat.
Even a single drop of juice from raw chicken meat can infect a person, the CDC said.
Salmonella and shigella were the second- and third-most common bacteria found by FoodNet last year, researchers said.
Researchers found slight year-to-year changes in the rates of illness detected through FoodNet, but they said it was too early to determine whether they "reflect year-to-year variation or are part of longer term trends."
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