Today is World Food Safety Day. This year, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization gave us a topic that sounded like it was written for the work I’ve been doing for the past 30 years. “From Burden to Solution – Safe Food Everywhere.”
I want to sit with those words — burden — For a moment, because the figures released by WHO to mark this day are staggering. Currently, the FDA estimates that unsafe foods cause approximately 866 million illnesses and 1.52 million deaths each year. Almost one in nine people on the planet becomes sick from food in any given year. The 2026 estimates are the first major update since WHO’s landmark 2015 report and not only update existing figures, but also expand the picture by adding heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and methylmercury to the risk list and providing country-specific estimates for the first time, allowing countries to see exactly where their burden lies.
That’s a big number. They are so big that they can be abstracted. These are statistics you can nod and scroll past. I have never had that luxury.
When I read ‘866 million’, I can’t see the number. I see Brianne Kiner, who was in a coma for months after eating a hamburger in 1993. We also see four children who did not survive the Jack in the Box outbreak. This outbreak ended my career just as I had planned and started my current career. I look at the families sitting across from me this year. Clostridium botulinum ByHeart Officials: People in 36 states have contracted salmonella from moringa supplements they bought thinking they were doing their health a favor. Burden is not a chart. It’s a person, usually someone who has done nothing wrong other than believing that their food is safe.
But here’s what I keep thinking about and why this year’s theme is so important to me. That latter part, the “solution,” is not wishful thinking. I know it’s achievable because I’ve seen it happen.
The Jack in the Box outbreak led the USDA in 1994 to declare E. coli O157:H7 as an adulterant in ground beef. This single regulatory decision prevented countless diseases in the years that followed. In 2012, six non-O157 variants of STEC (the “Big Six”) were added. These solutions all come from the same place. It required someone to count the burden, name it, and let the data drive a response without looking away. This is the whole theory of this year’s observance. Surveillance data collected honestly and shared openly turns tragedies into preventable tragedies.
Something came up today that I can’t celebrate.
Start with the most basic facts. America is no longer a member of today’s leading organizations. On January 22, 2026, after a year-long process, the United States completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO). The organization began with the United States as a founding member in 1948 and has spent more than 70 years building global food safety surveillance, which forms the basis of its 2026 theme. We have been the single largest funder of WHO for most of its history. Now the WHO has released its most significant update on the global burden of foodborne illness in a decade, and the country that has done more than any other to make that work possible has stepped away from the table. This flag still flies outside the Geneva headquarters. We are the ones who left.
And we didn’t stop there. If you dismantle the machine that measures the burden, you will not get a solution from the burden. Over the past year, I have continued to write about budget and staffing cuts at the FDA, CDC, and FSIS. These are the organizations whose epidemiologists, laboratory scientists and investigators produce the U.S. data that WHO calls on to take action around the world. An undetected outbreak generates no data. Incomplete tracebacks have no source name. A non-executing whole genome sequence does not link a disease to its cause. Even if you stop counting, the burden does not go away. It just disappears from the page.
And we’re increasingly hearing that even if the data exists, we can’t see it. I’ve spent much of this year fighting the FDA’s reflexive over-editing. Waivers of the vetting process resulted in supplier names being cleared, traceback documents being withheld, and the public being led to believe that someone, somewhere, was handling this. We cannot ask consumers, food companies and policy makers to make “informed choices” (in the words of the WHO) while refusing to provide information.
So here is the World Food Safety Day message I have been delivering in court and on this blog for 33 years. The burden is real, the people behind it are real, and the solutions are within reach. But this is only possible if you are willing to fund the calculations and share them. Data is not bureaucracy. The data is the difference between parents reading a recall notice and parents reading an autopsy report.
From burdens to solutions, find safe food everywhere. I believe it. Let’s act like we mean it today.
