Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch, Division of Foodborne, Bacterial, and Mycotic Diseases, National Center for Zoonotic, Vectorborne, and Enteric Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia 30333, USA.
Foodborne Pathog Dis. 2009 Dec;6(10):1259-64. doi: 10.1089/fpd.2009.0350.
To better understand the sources of foodborne illness, we propose a scheme for categorizing foods implicated in investigations of outbreaks of foodborne diseases. Because nearly 2000 foods have been reported as causing outbreaks in the United States, foods must be grouped for meaningful analyses.
We defined a hierarchy of 17 mutually exclusive food commodities. We defined the following three commodity groups from which nearly all food is derived: aquatic animals, land animals, and plants. We defined three commodities in aquatic animals, six in land animals, and eight in plants. We considered each food as a set of ingredients composed of one or more commodities. We defined a simple food as one made of ingredients that are all in one commodity and a complex food as one containing ingredients in more than one commodity. We determined likely ingredients using a panel of epidemiologists and a web-based search process.
We assigned 1709 (95%) of the 1794 foods implicated in outbreaks of foodborne diseases reported to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1973 to 2006. Of those, 987 (57%) were simple foods and 722 (43%) were complex foods.
This categorization may serve as an input for modeling the attribution of human illness to specific food commodities and could be used by policy makers, health officials, regulatory agencies, and consumer groups to evaluate the contribution of various food commodities to illness.
为了更好地了解食源性疾病的来源，我们提出了一种方案，将与食源性疾病暴发调查有关的食品进行分类。由于在美国有近 2000 种食品被报告引发了暴发，因此必须对食品进行分类，以便进行有意义的分析。
我们定义了一个 17 个相互排斥的食品商品的层次结构。我们定义了以下三个几乎所有食物都来源于此的商品组：水生动物、陆地动物和植物。我们在水生动物中定义了三种商品，在陆地动物中定义了六种商品，在植物中定义了八种商品。我们将每种食品视为由一种或多种商品组成的一组成分。我们将简单食品定义为由一种商品组成的成分，而将复杂食品定义为包含一种以上商品成分的食品。我们使用一组流行病学家和基于网络的搜索过程来确定可能的成分。
我们将 1973 年至 2006 年向疾病控制与预防中心报告的 1794 种食源性疾病暴发中涉及的 1709 种食品（95%）进行了分类。其中，987 种（57%）为简单食品，722 种（43%）为复杂食品。
这种分类方法可以作为将人类疾病归因于特定食品商品的模型的输入，并且可以被政策制定者、卫生官员、监管机构和消费者团体用来评估各种食品商品对疾病的贡献。
