Another recall just came across the news feed. A few minutes before that, there was a news flash about a foodborne outbreak. It got me to thinking: What is the correlation, if any, between the foodborne outbreaks and recalls?
I jumped into the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) foodborne outbreak investigations reporting tool and compared them with recalls issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). The latest data that matched both was from 2017 (the CDC hasn’t published anything newer).