While the US food supply is widely considered to be among the safest in the world, foodborne diseases are still thought to cause some 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the country each year. A 2001 analysis by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimated the annual medical costs, productivity losses, and value of premature deaths due to exposure to five common foodborne pathogens at $6.9 billion.

In the face of this major public health problem, USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service asked the Institute of Medicine to provide comments on their draft risk assessment of the public-health impact of the microbial pathogen E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef.

The committee that conducted the evaluation commended the draft's authors on the magnitude of their effort and the principles behind it. Two unifying concepts underlie many of their comments on the draft report. The first concept is that the risk assessment will be improved by being more explicit about the assumptions that motivate its structure, choice of variables, data and equations. The second is that the lack of data on major components of the processes being modeled hampers the ability to construct an informative risk assessment.

The committee recommends that data deficiencies identified in the draft risk assessment serve as the foundation for setting research priorities so that the model and E. coli O157:H7 policy decisions can be improved in the future.