On Feb. 14, 2007, ConAgra Foods issued a voluntary recall of Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butters after the brands were linked to a Salmonella outbreak that had sickened 425 people in 44 states. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), product testing confirmed the presence of the outbreak strain of Salmonella Tennessee in opened jars of peanut butter that were obtained from consumers who had become ill.

The peanut butter recall follows a number of other high-profile outbreaks of food-borne illnesses involving Salmonella and other pathogens, such as E. coli and Listeria, in the past few years. For example, on Dec. 13, 2006, the CDC reported that 71 people had become ill after eating at Taco Bell restaurants in five states. The CDC confirmed that at least 48 of the 71 patients tested positive for a single strain of E. coli that was traced to the restaurants. Just two months earlier, the CDC announced that 199 people had been infected with another strain of E. coli bacteria that was traced to the consumption of tainted spinach.

These outbreaks are not isolated occurrences. The CDC estimates that food-borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. Thus, contaminated food products cause more deaths each year than the combined total of all 15,000 products regulated by the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission. 5 Food-borne illnesses now account for approximately 1 percent of all hospitalizations and one out of every 500 deaths in the United States.

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