The NYT wants you to believe that foodborne disease is on the rise

Last year, the NYT published a claim by Paul Krugman that

Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years.

Just in case we hadn't gotten the message, Krugman repeated himself yesterday on the editorial page:

Bad Cow Disease

By Paul Krugman

“Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it’s labeled chicken.”

That little ditty famously summarized the message of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of conditions in America’s meat-packing industry. Sinclair’s muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act — and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.

Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines — tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea protesting the pro-American prime minister’s decision to allow imports of U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003.

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

It started with ideology . . . .

What about reality? Are we really facing a resurgence of foodborne disease? Enter the Centers for Disease Control, which keeps statistics on foodborne diseases. They track both cases and outbreaks. Going through their reports, and graphing their numbers, we end up with the following (click the chart to enlarge it):


Turns out foodborne disease has been more or less steady over the past eight years. Due to a methodological change at the CDC in 1998, prior data cannot usefully be compared. As expected, there is significant year to year variability. There may be a slight downward overall trend -- but the data are noisy enough that it's difficult to be sure.

Immediately after posting this, I will write the NYT, informing them of their error and linking to this post. If any correction is forthcoming, I'll post it on the blog.

Hat Tip: Alex Tabarrok