Eating is one of the most essential and fulfilling parts of life. Unfortunately, many people today are still getting sick and dying from dangerously tainted food, a report from the World Health Organization reveals.
On Wednesday, the WHO released its latest estimates on the global toll of foodborne disease. More than 800 million people worldwide are sickened every year by food-related hazards, both microbial and chemical, while over 1.5 million people are killed annually, the report concluded. Many of these illnesses and deaths are preventable with better sanitation and improved health care access, the WHO says.
“The high burden of both communicable and non-communicable foodborne diseases requires countries to prioritize developing strategies to improve the safety of the food supply,” wrote the authors of the report, published in The Lancet Global Health.
The toll of bad food
There are all sorts of things that can make our food unhealthy to consume, from viruses and bacteria to toxic metals like lead.
In 2015, the WHO estimated that foodborne illness affected roughly 10% of the world’s population and killed at least 420,000 people annually. Even at the time, however, officials noted these numbers were likely an undercount, due to the many gaps in the research they had available.
For this latest report, researchers looked at data from 194 countries between 2000 and 2021. It now covers 42 sources of foodborne illness, up from 31 in the 2015 report. These new dangers include metals, rotavirus, and Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease (though typically spread by insect bites, either the pathogen itself or infected animals can also contaminate food).
In 2021, at least 866 million people worldwide developed foodborne disease, the report estimates, and 1.52 million people died as a result. These illnesses and deaths also caused a financial toll of $647 billion (USD) in lost productivity, after adjusting for cost-of-living differences between countries.
Nearly all cases of foodborne disease were caused by germs (860 million), the report further found. And though children under five are only 9% of the world’s population, they accounted for nearly one-third of all cases. Meanwhile, a disproportionate amount of food-related deaths (over a million) were linked to metal contamination, particularly inorganic arsenic (42% of deaths) and lead (31%), both of which can raise the risk of heart disease and cancer.
“Unsafe food has always been a major public health concern, but until now we lacked the bigger picture of its staggering human and economic toll. These new estimates change that,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, in a statement from the WHO.
What to do now
Foodborne disease happens everywhere, including the U.S. Norovirus alone is thought to sicken roughly 20 million Americans every year.
Yet there are clearly some areas of the world more vulnerable to unsafe food. According to the report, a majority of illnesses (almost 75%) and deaths (60%) occurred in African and Southeast Asian regions. The countries in these regions and the world as a whole will need to work together to help combat foodborne disease, the WHO says.
“This report is a wake‑up call—but also a roadmap. The data show that foodborne diseases are not only persistent but are being made worse by climate change, which increases contamination risks, and by antimicrobial resistance, which makes infections harder to treat. We cannot tackle these threats alone,” said senior report author Yuki Minato, WHO technical officer for food safety, in a statement.
Minato stressed that a One Health approach, which links human, animal, plant, and environmental health, is critical. She urged countries to use these findings to guide interventions, strengthen surveillance, improve coordination across sectors, and act quickly, warning that “delay costs lives.”
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