WASHINGTON — Contaminated food is causing a growing number of illnesses in the United States, and severe cases that lead to hospitalization or death are becoming more common.
There were about 300 food recalls in 2024, associated with nearly 1,400 illnesses, according to a report published last week by the Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit focused on consumer protection. There were 487 people who were sick enough to be hospitalized and 19 who died from an illness related to contaminated food, double the number of hospitalizations and deaths in 2023.
Overall, the total number of recalls under the US Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture in 2024 ticked down compared with 2023. There was an 8% increase in recalls under the FDA, which regulates more than three-quarters of the nation’s food supply, but there was a 38% drop in the number of recalls under the USDA, which regulates meat, poultry and some fish and egg products.
But the number of food recalls isn’t the best gauge of the safety of the US food supply, said Teresa Murray, director of the consumer watchdog program with the Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG. More recalls could indicate more proactive testing by state and federal regulators, for example, and many recalls are caught before anyone gets sick, she said.
“Most years, the number of recalls doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the safety of food,” Murray said.
“But it’s absolutely significant that the number of hospitalizations and deaths doubled from the previous year,” she said. “That seems to indicate that the food that was out there was perhaps more contaminated, sometimes with higher concentrations of bacteria to drive people to the hospital.”
In fact, nearly all illnesses last year were associated with just 13 outbreaks, according to the recent report.
Many involved familiar brands, such as the E. coli contamination of onions used in McDonald’s Quarter Pounder sandwiches, which led to 104 illnesses, 34 hospitalizations and one death. The Listeria contamination of Boar’s Head deli meats led to 61 illnesses, 60 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.
Contaminated meat and eggs caused more than a quarter of all hospitalizations associated with food recalls in 2024, the analysis found, but produce was the top culprit. Cucumbers alone led to more than a third of all hospitalizations, most tied to a Salmonella outbreak in June, followed by onions and carrots.
“It’s the things that we don’t cook that tend to be the biggest problems,” Murray said. Cooking can often kill bacteria that causes illness, but it sits on raw food and can multiply if not managed properly, she said.
In 2024, recalls from Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli jumped more than 40%, according to the report. These three bacteria combined caused more than a third of all food recalls in the US in 2024.
But another third of recalls were related to undeclared allergens, such as peanuts or tree nuts found in products without being included on the label. Undeclared allergens were still the top reason for recalls last year, but there was a notable improvement since 2023, when they accounted for nearly half of all recalls. Some of that improvement may be attributed to greater awareness among food producers that sesame is an allergen that requires disclosure, PIRG researchers said.
The Food Safety Modernization Act, signed by President Barack Obama in 2011, led to an overall safer food supply by creating more than a dozen new rules governing areas such as good manufacturing practices, agricultural water, sanitary transportation, hazard analysis and mitigation strategies to protect our food.
But these rules have taken a while to get fully fleshed out, finalized and implemented. For example, the Produce Safety rule, which was designed to prevent situations like the slivered onions problem, was put in place in 2016.
Another factor helping to identify recalls — and possibly the perception of less-safe food — has been progress in the technology used to reveal an outbreak and link information about its potential source, food safety expert Dr. Donald Schaffner recently told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his podcast “Chasing Life.”
“The CDC is getting better and better at finding outbreaks thanks to advances in whole genome sequencing,” Schaffner said. “It may have been in the past we had outbreaks like this, but we could never link them together, because we didn’t know that all of these different people in all of these different states all got sick around the same time from eating the same food.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will oversee the FDA as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, has indicated that reforming the US food system is one of his key priorities.
“They are calling for fixing the food system, doing something to coordinate and address diet-related chronic diseases, stopping corporate power, eliminating conflicts of interest between industry and government, getting toxic chemicals out of the food supply, and doing everything possible to refocus the food environment and dietary advice on health,” food policy researcher Marion Nestle wrote on her Food Politics blog in October.
And last week, an executive order from President Donald Trump announced the establishment of the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which would focus on the food system along with other efforts to reduce chronic disease and improve life expectancy in the US.
A key policy focus for the commission will be to “work with farmers to ensure that United States food is the healthiest, most abundant, and most affordable in the world.”
But Kennedy’s potential agenda and widespread upheaval at federal health agencies have many public health experts worried.
Still, the responsibility for keeping the US food supply safe is shared by many across the system, Murray said.
“We wouldn’t need recalls if food was safe from the jump,” she said, referencing the role of food manufacturers, processors and packagers. “There is nothing wrong with companies doing a better job testing food, and some of [the responsibility] obviously does sit with regulators – state and federal – who do inspections and testing of their own.”
For consumers who want to be as safe as possible with the food they eat, Murray says there are three important things: not leaving food out, regularly washing hands and utensils when working with food, and figuring out a way to stay informed about recalls that may affect you, such as signing up for alerts from favorite grocery stores or downloading an app that provides real-time notifications on recalls.
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