question on Food Bourne Illness?

Question

How would you go about doing a retrospective study to determine the source of an outbreak of food borne illness

Answer 1

You might start with a search for cases of food-born illness and epidemics. You might also wish to narrow down your search for a specific causative agent. Good luck!

Answer 2

First you pick your study design. Do you want to do a retrospective cohort or case-control?

If you have a group of folks whose outcome (illness) is known, and you want to locate the exposure, do the case-control. You will compare people who got sick versus people from the same group who did not get sick. This is a study design I use very frequently.

Interview all the people from the group and collect data on what items each of them ate. Then do some statistics (odds ratios, usually) and determine if any particular items are significantly associated with being ill.

If you wanted to do a retrospective cohort study, first you look at your exposure (some common food item or dining-type event). Then you go back to a list of guests and see how many of them got sick after eating the item.

A retro-cohort is best when dealing with food recalls. For example, you could find all the people who bought Peter Pan peanut butter earlier in the year, and then go back into their medical histories (or do interviews) to see how many of them got sick with Salmonella.

Feel free to ask me to clarify.

Answer 3

Food borne illnesses are caused by a bacteria, virus, and sometimes parasites. If a person eats food which has been contaminated by these germs (also called microbes or pathogens) they begin to divide and multiply in the digestive system. As the number of germs increase, the person becomes ill.

The time varies from the time the contaminated food is eaten until illness occurs. Salmonella bacteria, for example, develop in the intestine after the meal has been digested. It takes a few hours for the stomach to empty into the intestine, so a person gets ill usually about 4 - 6 hours after eating. Botulism, on the other hand, doesn't appear until 18 - 36 hours after eating, sometimes even 4 to 8 days later.

Most of the time, illness occurs because food was improperly cooked or cooled, and not kept at the proper temperature. Food prepared ANYWHERE from home, city fairs, even taste tests at the local store can cause illness if prepared and handled incorrectly.

The U. S. Centers for Disease Control list these 6 circumstances as the ones most likely to lead to food borne illness. Check through the list to make sure you have covered these common causes of food borne disease:
1. Inadequate Cooling and Cold Holding. More than half of all food poisonings are due to keeping foods out at room temperature for more than 2 - 4 hours. Cold foods must be kept at a temperature of 40 degrees F.
2. Preparing food too far ahead of serving. Food prepared twelve or more hours before it is served increases the risk of temperature abuse.
3. Poor personal hygiene and infected personnel. Poor hand washing techniques along with improper hygiene as well as food handlers working while ill are implicated in 1 out of every 4 food poisonings.
4. Inadequate reheating. Leftover food must be held above 140 degrees F until served. Otherwise, they can become highly contaminated.
5. Inadequate hot holding. Cooked foods not held above 135 degrees F until served can become highly contaminated.
6. Contaminated raw foods & ingredients. Serving raw shellfish or raw milk that is contaminated, or using contaminated raw eggs in sauces and dressings, has often led to outbreaks of food borne disease. It is always safer to use pasteurized products

it was what i could find i hope it helps tho!!!!!!!!here are ways to tell someone at a research study thing.

Answer 4

talk to all the people that got sick & see what/where they had all eaten. then you can figure out what actually caused the illness with the other answer's info.