List of foodborne illness outbreaks by death toll
Wikimedia list article
This is a list of foodborne illness outbreaks by death toll, caused by infectious disease, heavy metals, chemical contamination, or from natural toxins, such as those found in poisonous mushrooms.
Before modern microbiology, foodborne illness was not understood, and, from the mid 1800s to early-mid 1900s, was perceived as ptomaine poisoning, caused by a fundamental flaw in understanding how it worked. While the medical establishment ditched ptomaine theory by the 1930s, it remained in the public consciousness until the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Outside of botulism (which has been well known since the early 1900s and killed often at the time), many other foodborne illnesses such as salmonellosis were not monitored closely or kept careful track of until at least the late 1970s, with overall monitoring only fully taking off after the 1992–1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of foodborne illness outbreaks by death toll” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.