Foodborne Diseases: Prevalence of Foodborne Diseases in Europe

Official estimates of the prevalence of foodborne disease are highly biased, failing to account for underdiagnosis and underreporting of laboratory-confirmed clinical disease in people. To overcome the biases inherent in routine surveillance there has been a burgeoning in methods used to assess the prevalence of foodborne disease in Europe. These show that prevalence of foodborne illness across Europe is very high no matter what method is used to measure it. Salmonella and Campylobacter are consistently found to be the leading foodborne pathogens in Europe.