A wide variety of pathogens can cause disease in humans through the consumption of contaminated food [1–3]. Contamination of food can occur at any point from farm to table, as a result of improper hygiene, handling, storage or preparation, and the broad range of food products that can be contaminated adds to the complexity. An estimated 652,000 cases of infectious diseases because of contaminated food occurred in 2018 in the Netherlands, leading to around EUR 171 million in costs [4]. This figure and corresponding costs have remained at the same level since 2009 [4,5]. The exact number of cases remains unknown; only a minority of food-borne cases is captured by surveillance systems since most infections are relatively mild and no diagnostic testing is performed. Furthermore, not all food-borne infections are systematically monitored.
Although recognised food-borne outbreaks only account for a small part of the food-borne disease burden, they can provide insight into the pathogens causing outbreaks, food products implied as vehicles, points of contamination, and settings in which transmission occurs [6,7]. Determination of the contaminated food product is difficult, especially in sporadic cases, because of varying incubation periods in which many exposures occurred, as well as recall bias. Outbreaks offer the opportunity to gather consumption data from more than one case and to perform a comparison with controls, which increases the chance of finding the contaminated food item. Analysis of data over a longer period also offers the opportunity to describe trends in food-borne outbreaks, to identify new and emerging food-borne pathogens and specific pathogen-food combinations, and to examine the public health importance of pathogens, which can be used to improve food safety [6,8].
The aim of this study is to describe the characteristics of food-borne outbreaks registered between 2006 and 2019 in the Netherlands in order to provide a better understanding of food-borne outbreaks and to guide efforts to control, reduce and prevent future food-borne illness.
FoodWorld 