Recipes for foodborne outbreaks: a scheme for categorizing and grouping implicated foods.

Background: To better understand the sources of foodborne illness, we propose a scheme for categorizing foods implicated in investigations of outbreaks of foodborne diseases. Because nearly 2000 foods have been reported as causing outbreaks in the United States, foods must be grouped for meaningful analyses.

Methods: We defined a hierarchy of 17 mutually exclusive food commodities.

A waterborne outbreak of gastroenteritis with multiple etiologies among resort island visitors and residents: Ohio, 2004.

Background: The implementation of treated municipal water systems in the 20th century led to a dramatic decrease in waterborne disease in the United States. However, communities with deficient water systems still experience waterborne outbreaks. In August 2004, we investigated an outbreak of gastroenteritis on South Bass Island, Ohio, an island of 900 residents that is visited by >500,000 persons each year.