Specific diagnosis of foodborne disease.

To control foodborne disease effectively and to treat patients and their contacts appropriately, it is important to determine the etiology of a foodborne disease outbreak. The majority of such outbreaks reported to the Center for Disease Control are of undetermined etiology, usually for lack of appropriate laboratory tests. In this paper, the commonly reported foodborne diseases are differentiated clinically by their median incubation period, predominant symptomatology, and median durations of illness, and epidemiologically by their vehicles of transmission, geographic locations, and seasonal predilections. Laboratory tests are recommended with which to confirm the initial clinical and epidemiological impression.